What makes my artistic journey a "crisis"? Well, the short answer is an unstable conglomeration of perfectionism and narcissism.
I've always wanted to be the best at something. I don't know if it's an overcompensation for being constantly verbally beaten down for the first 18 years of my life, or, paradoxically, an internalization of the inordinate praise I have also gotten along side the abuse. Probably a bit of both. But it has only been in the past few months that I've even been able to psychologically handle the idea of being just "pretty good" at stuff. What happens to people who are just "pretty good"? Nothing. They live normal lives and then get forgotten or ignored by society at large. My life has been anything but normal, so I can't handle the idea of being cheated out of a normal life and the creative genius that often accompanies varying degrees of insanity.
In the past few months I've been forced to face the reality that I will probably never be the best at anything--partly because I have finally surrendered to adult life and begun working full-time, and being the best simply requires too much time; and partly just as a result of trying so goddamn hard my whole life to be the best and failing again and again. (After all, it's a pretty high bar.) Once I come out on the other side of the grieving process for my delusions of grandeur, I'm sure I'll be a much healthier person, psychologically speaking. But in the meantime, it makes it very difficult for me to stay motivated to produce art that I know will never be more than "slightly above average."
My decision to "quit" came about a month after I began working full-time. My job at a substance abuse treatment facility is incredibly rewarding and never boring--two things I don't think I could manage without--but it is also incredibly stressful and involves a lot of guesswork. It's hard to know how well I'm doing, whether anything I do is actually making a difference, etc. I really don't even have a job description. After more than six months of full-time work (I spent an additional seven months working part-time at the same place), I'm finally starting to adjust, but at the beginning it took all my emotional stamina just to get myself to work every day and push through the learning curve. (There's a lot more to that story, but there's a limit to what I'm willing to say in a public forum.) It was still stressful when I was part-time, but there was plenty of time to decompress, so spending hours upon hours on my equally frustrating hobby was manageable. Once I went full-time, though, I was essentially spending 50+ hours a week (between working overtime and making art) confronting my perfectionism and other insecurities head-on, and at a certain point it "broke" me. I found myself getting angry, wanting to snap my brushes and burn my paintings, without producing anything "great" enough to balance it out with positive reinforcement. So I "quit."
Before all this happened, I was working on portraits--digital copies of old masterworks, celebrity portraits, and oil paintings of my friends. This spring I started working on another series of oils. I did a few decent abstract paintings (which I'll discuss in a later post), and the monochromatic portrait at the top of this page.
I think this one turned out extremely well and I'm very proud of it. Maybe I should have stuck with a few more monochromatic ones before venturing back into the frustrating and confusing world of color. Instead, I simultaneously jumped into two different projects: my first attempt at a dual portrait, and what was supposed to be another run-of-the-mill single portrait of another friend. The dual portrait never made it beyond the underpainting stage, and I'm not sure it's salvageable. The single portrait looked like this when I rage-quit:
Looking back now, it's not great, but it's certainly not as bad as I was making it out to be. The problem was that I had just spent weeks reading book after book about how to use color in portraiture, which resulted in me trying to abandon the loose and expressive style I'd used before in favor of a more "realistic" look. I found myself painting over the same spots over and over and over again, trying to find the perfect colors, the perfect shading, the perfect everything. I became hyperfocused on my tiny mistakes, and my inability to produce anything approaching photorealism finally made me snap--which is weird, because I don't even like photorealistic painting.
The half-finished painting sat unattended in my art closet for several months. I went back and forth on whether or not I wanted to just destroy it. I was about to do so when I showed it to my sister, who said it was "adorable" and basically that I was an idiot for thinking it was garbage. Somehow I actually believed her. Six months had passed since I'd started working full-time; I had made it through the steep learning curve and was ready to confront my perfectionism in another area of my life again. And so I pulled this one back out of the closet and turned it into this:
Okay, so I don't suck. I get it. Psychologically I'm now ready to dive back in; the only problem being that the stress of my job has been replaced by the hellishly long process of figuring out which mystery chronic illness I have and how to treat it, so I still don't quite have the physical energy to devote much time to art again yet. Hopefully soon.