And it's all instagram's fault.
Me, painting with wet hair because that’s how it is this morning.
I’m changing the name of my Substack again, because I can :)
Edit: I just changed it back again to 88% True. Because it’s a better name.
I’m curious about the art of transformation.
The journey from blank canvas to beautiful art. Or blank Substack page to written piece. Or nothing to fully-fledged business. From idea to project in motion. From a world with hunger to one without.
The process of change. How staring into beauty opens the heart. How nothing shifts into something over and over again. The ‘magical’ helping hands that we call luck or the muse because we don’t know what else to call them. The breath of God (my favourite definition of inspiration) that blows us in one direction or another, regardless of ‘what we know we should be doing’.
I spoke with my mentor, Michael Neill, over dinner on Friday. “I see others around me at my age who are really really good at something because by now they’ve been doing it for decades. I have hop, skipped and jumped all over the place and I’m sad I don’t have that.”
“There’s one thing you’re better at than almost anyone I know,” he said. “Starting things from nothing and turning them into something.”
So here we are.
Funny that we begin on a day when I’m completely stuck.
“Nobody tells this to people who are beginners, I wish someone told me. All of us who do creative work, we get into it because we have good taste. But there is this gap. For the first couple years you make stuff, it’s just not that good. It’s trying to be good, it has potential, but it’s not. But your taste, the thing that got you into the game, is still killer. And your taste is why your work disappoints you. A lot of people never get past this phase, they quit. Most people I know who do interesting, creative work went through years of this. We know our work doesn’t have this special thing that we want it to have. We all go through this. And if you are just starting out or you are still in this phase, you gotta know its normal and the most important thing you can do is do a lot of work. Put yourself on a deadline so that every week you will finish one story. It is only by going through a volume of work that you will close that gap, and your work will be as good as your ambitions. And I took longer to figure out how to do this than anyone I’ve ever met. It’s gonna take awhile. It’s normal to take awhile. You’ve just gotta fight your way through.”
―Ira Glass
I am right in the middle of this journey at the moment with my art.
I paint and I paint and most times I cannot create the beauty I know is there, if I could just put my finger on it.
Occasionally it arrives, through my hands but not painted by me.
I move colours and shapes, first just raw outline of something as a first layer, then I get to the messy, ugly in-between bit (a shitty first draft, as Anne Lamott would say).
One of three things happens here:
I forget (only almost every time) that there is always a messy, ugly in-between bit and I give up in disgust. Paint the whole thing white and begin again. This is a loop that could continue forever.
I remember this is just the messy, ugly in-between bit, step away from the canvas so she can do her ugly without me having to get involved, come back and keep going. Only to find there’s nothing that will shift this one into something beautiful in my eyes. Sometimes I post about her anyway and it turns out beauty is in the eye of the beholder.
(My favourite) I remember this is just the messy, ugly in-between bit, step away from the canvas so she can do her ugly without me having to get involved, come back and keep going. And the x-factor shows up and at some point I stop and am in awe of what has just happened. I post about her and sometimes she sells and sometimes she doesn’t but in the meantime she sits front and centre in my office and if you’re on a zoom call with me and you can see I’m not looking at the camera, it’s because I’m gawping at her wondering who the hell painted THAT!?
But, ouch, the desire to create beauty is what runs through my veins; my reason to get up every morning and it physically hurts when what I want to express cannot be today.
Right now, I’m looking at a piece I’ve been working on. I suspect she falls into camp 2.
“But your taste, the thing that got you into the game, is still killer. And your taste is why your work disappoints you.”
That. Fucking instagram scrolling has a lot to answer for.
And
“A lot of people never get past this phase, they quit.”
Of course they do, why wouldn’t we when it hurts?
Yesterday my husband and I re-drew our plans for the cow-shed renovation and I took out the art studio and instead put in a garage for the cars. I nearly posted a 50% true story about my days at uni that was shocking and funny, rather than write about this.
The hard days.
The self-doubt days.
The fuck-it, just let it go (but not in a spiritual zen kind of way) days.
The ‘surely if it was meant to be it would be easy’ days.
The ‘let’s just go back to what I’m comfortable with’ days.
But instead, I’m here. Writing this. And by doing so, keeping myself in the game.
“Most people I know who do interesting, creative work went through years of this.”
I don’t know about years.
But I can say today, I will show up to the painterly life again.
Every piece I paint has her person.
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