If you consider yourself an artist or creative person, then you’ll be familiar
with the feeling of artist block. It's when you feel like you can’t work on anything,
you can’t think of new ideas, and you don’t even know how to start. So, if you’re willing
to get imaginative with me today, I’m going to be personifying my artist block as characters,
to try and better understand the forces that are working in my mind when I don’t feel like
creating. I got this idea from a Youtuber called Struthless, he’s a huge creative inspiration to me
and I’ll link his video in the description box if you’d like to watch that as well.
The first one I’m starting with is perfectionism. And today I’m working with gouache on watercolour
paper - gouache is a paint that’s kind of in between watercolour and acrylic paint.
Originally I decided that she needed to have scrutinising eyes that are looking for mistakes,
to capture that pin-pricking criticism that I feel when perfectionism strikes.
I got to this point and then ironically, I realised that I wasn’t happy with it,
and I started again. She looked way too friendly! I experimented with some sketches and poses,
trying to explore the way that it makes me feel. This little guy was too cute.
What I ended up with was inspired by Tim Burton and the Other Mother from Coraline,
to give that kind of horror feel. In reality, perfectionism is debilitating and makes me feel
very small and hopeless. I guess in this painting process I realised that perfectionism is really
good at tricking me into thinking the criticism is coming from a good place, which is why I imagined
her having this very human mask to begin with. I wanted her to appear somewhat humanoid, to reflect
how she originally tricked me into thinking she was less sinister than she actually was.
But at her core there’s a coldness, she hates mistakes, even though mistakes are
an unavoidable part of the creative process. I was also drawn to the colouring of carnivorous
plants - with that electric green and red. She pretends to be helpful, but is actually very,
very destructive, hence the magnifying lenses for scrutinising, and blades for dissecting.
The main feelings that I feel when this character appears are fears of not being good enough.
And the feeling usually strikes before I’m about to start a new project. In some cases the thoughts
will sound like “wait until you have a better camera” or “you can’t create this yet, wait until
you have better materials” - all justifications to make me put off working on it now. This is
a lie of course, because the conditions for creating things will never be 100% perfect.
Instead I’ve been keeping in mind the 70% rule in mind which is “can I make it 70% perfect?”.
This removes the pressure of perfectionism, and allows me the freedom to make mistakes or be a
little messy, so that I can create and express myself with less anxiety about the end result.
I’m not 100% happy with how this one turned out finished, but I learned a lot during the
process about how my perfectionist thoughts have stopped me from creating in the past,
so that I can identify perfectionist thoughts in the future and call them out for what they are.
At the end of the day, I create things because it feels good to express myself through my art and
there’s no point creating something physically perfect if I didn’t enjoy the process.
The next portrait is my people pleasing tendencies. They want to please everyone,
and make me think about the audience’s perspective and how the art will be received.
This of course stops me from creating authentically and being myself.
The main identifying factor about people pleasing is that it comes from a place of fear instead of
a place of love. When I create my art from a place of fear of rejection, I’m assuming how
the audience will respond to it and changing the art to be unprovocative and palatable.
There are actually lots of videos I made in the past that weren’t actually myself,
but I made them because I thought it was what the audience wanted to see or what would
perform well. But the fear of showing my real personality means that I struggle to create art
for the sake of creating art, because I’m always thinking about how it will be perceived instead.
Since I started becoming aware of the people pleasing thoughts, I’ve been enjoying creating
way more, and I’m able to feel proud of what I created because it feels authentic. I found that
the best way to sense out which thoughts are being inspired by people pleasing is to work on trusting
my intuition in all areas of my life. When you become more reliant on intuition, you can feel
when you aren’t doing something authentically, and this has been the best way I’ve found to test
whether what I’m making is really me or not, by trusting that gut feeling. The motif I felt most
drawn to was one of those mannequin foam heads with the long neck.. But then also a disco ball.
The mannequin is casting all these reflections of other people’s desires,
criticisms and beliefs, and she thinks the distorted reflections are her own thoughts.
Now that I understand this character a bit better, I’m able to better discern which thoughts
are authentic, and it’s been infinitely more rewarding to make things that feel like myself,
instead of just what other people want to see.
The third character is dissociation. Everyone dissociates during the day for short periods of
time, where you zone out and suddenly wonder “wait how did I get here?”. And that’s pretty normal,
but it can be quite scary when you realise that your body has been on autopilot for a long period
of time. Dissociation and derealisation is something I’ve actually been dealing with in
my life for a long time, and fortunately it has gotten better with therapy and coping strategies.
Sometimes I get ready to do some art, and then find myself laying in bed watching netflix,
and it’s somehow been 5 hours. When I’m in a dissociative trance, I don’t realise until I come
out of it, so it’s been quite hard to pin down what’s triggered it, so I can stop that from
happening. From the research I’ve done, it’s an adaptive defence strategy that the brain will
do sometimes to cope with an overwhelming threat that cannot be prevented or escaped.
Sometimes dissociation will creep up on me in my everyday life
in weird little ways and it affects me from being able to do my art.
Dissociation in my creative practice usually
appears when I feel resistance or difficulty, and my mind shuts off.
I’ll then be distracted by something mindless,
like binging bad tv shows that have a lot of seasons, or just sleeping to fill in the time.
For this character, I wanted to portray the gloominess,
the lethargic and weighed down feeling, and how it kinda feels like being hypnotised.
Like how when you sit underwater, time just feels like it slows down.
Creating these paintings ended up being an accidental shadow work exercise - it helped
me to deep dive into my consciousness, and try to untangle which thoughts come from where.
It’s hard to describe how to do this process, because it’s different for everyone, but basically
if you turn your attention inwards you can begin to recognise patterns in the thoughts that come
up. I identified all the different thoughts that stopped me from being able to do my art,
and then from there I was able to narrow them down to three distinct categories,
which is how I came up with perfectionism, people pleasing, and dissociation.
I guess the common theme between all of them is fear. Fear is the enemy of self expression,
so if you want to tackle fear within yourself, making messy art that you know might not be 100%
perfect, or might not be what other people wanna see is an amazing way to show love to yourself.
This video ended up being a lot more deep and honest than I expected it would be when I started
filming it. However if you struggle with artist block, I’d highly recommend you try this exercise.
Personifying them as characters allows me to better see where the thoughts come from,
so I can identify them in the future and be kind to myself. The perfectionist part
of my mind right now is freaking out that this video is way too vulnerable to put out there,
but I want to create a space on my channel where it’s safe for us to talk about mental health with
each other. And I think art is very connected to how we understand ourselves and our mental health,
so it's a fantastic tool for mindfulness. If you want to write about your artist block, feel free
to in the comments section, and if you make an artwork or a video exploring this, please let
me know so that I can see it (i would love to see it). If you’re still watching, thank you so much
for your open-mindedness, and for coming on this journey with me and I’ll see you in my next video.