Re:Why I Quit DIY (2014)
by pmoriarty on Saturday May 15, 2021 @08:50PM
(#27170274)
This post is a classic description of burnout that affects many creators, whether they're craftsmen, visual artists, musicians, sculptors, or what have you.
The depth and intensity of this struggle is something that few non-artists appreciate or understand.
Some artists react by taking a break from creating, and may come back to it in a week or a month. Some don't come back to it for years or decades. Some never do.
I don't have answers that would be guaranteed to work for everyone, or anyone, really, but what helped me was to embrace randomness much more in my art, and trying to nudge my work in a direction that I like rather than attempting to force it to be a certain way.
I now look at my art as more of a plant that I help to grow, where we are the collaborators in the end result, rather than trying to build according to a pre-planned blueprint.
Perfectionism is something that I had to abandon, and I've come to be much more accepting of art that at some stage looks "bad", because I know that if I continue working on it it'll probably drift in to a state I like at some point, even if it's nothing like I intended or envisioned earlier on in the process.
Making art just to please myself is something else that's helped. I'm not trying to win any popularity contests with my work, and don't really care what other people think of it.. in fact, I rarely show it to anyone. Though some of it is online, I don't think many people have seen it, and I've gotten little feedback on it.. but even when I have it doesn't matter to me if someone thinks it's great or awful.
I still try to improve my art, but only to my own standards, so that I myself like it more. It can still be frustrating when my work is not as moving to me as I'd like or when I feel like I'm repeating myself, but I don't feel nearly as bad when I was comparing my work with the great masters, or with some ideal.
On the other hand, I've sometimes wonder if the cure to burnout in art is to make more art, and to just work through it, no matter how you feel. I haven't pursued that path myself, but I have heard of others working this way. I've heard that Stephen King, for instance, likes to think of himself as a bricklayer, laying one brick on top of another as he writes. A bricklayer doesn't wait for inspiration to strike before hey lay the next brick, they just do it. Many other artists and writers have the same workman-like attitude, and are very disciplined about it, keeping their butt in the chair when it comes time to write, no matter how they feel. It's not my way, but it seems to have worked well for lots of pros.
The depth and intensity of this struggle is something that few non-artists appreciate or understand.
Some artists react by taking a break from creating, and may come back to it in a week or a month. Some don't come back to it for years or decades. Some never do.
I don't have answers that would be guaranteed to work for everyone, or anyone, really, but what helped me was to embrace randomness much more in my art, and trying to nudge my work in a direction that I like rather than attempting to force it to be a certain way.
I now look at my art as more of a plant that I help to grow, where we are the collaborators in the end result, rather than trying to build according to a pre-planned blueprint.
Perfectionism is something that I had to abandon, and I've come to be much more accepting of art that at some stage looks "bad", because I know that if I continue working on it it'll probably drift in to a state I like at some point, even if it's nothing like I intended or envisioned earlier on in the process.
Making art just to please myself is something else that's helped. I'm not trying to win any popularity contests with my work, and don't really care what other people think of it.. in fact, I rarely show it to anyone. Though some of it is online, I don't think many people have seen it, and I've gotten little feedback on it.. but even when I have it doesn't matter to me if someone thinks it's great or awful.
I still try to improve my art, but only to my own standards, so that I myself like it more. It can still be frustrating when my work is not as moving to me as I'd like or when I feel like I'm repeating myself, but I don't feel nearly as bad when I was comparing my work with the great masters, or with some ideal.
On the other hand, I've sometimes wonder if the cure to burnout in art is to make more art, and to just work through it, no matter how you feel. I haven't pursued that path myself, but I have heard of others working this way. I've heard that Stephen King, for instance, likes to think of himself as a bricklayer, laying one brick on top of another as he writes. A bricklayer doesn't wait for inspiration to strike before hey lay the next brick, they just do it. Many other artists and writers have the same workman-like attitude, and are very disciplined about it, keeping their butt in the chair when it comes time to write, no matter how they feel. It's not my way, but it seems to have worked well for lots of pros.