It’s amazing how often I have found that the reason why people don’t have confidence is simply because they’re not willing to take the risk to learn something new. And learning something new can come about simply through learning from the most obvious of accidents that are happening in your studio in your normal process of working.
I say all of these things, while at the same time remembering the times in my life where I have had a simple fear of putting pencil to paper or paint to canvas. It’s not uncommon. I think it’s just really important to go easy on yourself. Give yourself a bit of slack while at the same time be conscious of what is happening to you in these moments. But it is really important especially in the early stages as an artist, to allow yourself to fully explore all different types of styles.
Let yourself paint like a child, let yourself draw like a child. Even let yourself create like an adolescent knowing you are an adult. Let yourself make lots and lots of mistakes and once again learn from the accidents that are inherent in these mistakes. They could be the things that separate you from the mediocre.
So you have to be pretty aware of how much you criticize yourself. The inner critic can be a real killjoy. You can stifle your creativity to the point where you can spend literally days – and I have, sitting in your studio in front of a series of beautifully prepared works on paper or stretched canvases, pristine with their white gesso freshly applied, while you scratch your head in complete frustration not knowing where to start. If this is happening to you, I would suggest the following: Get some sheets of cardboard, put them on the floor and give them a couple of quick coats of gesso or any other primer and just start going to work.
Either start drawing on them all, begin to put washes of paint down and start to develop up some kind of surface. Just start somewhere and see where it goes. You see some of the problem originates with how tedious you become with the preparation of the surface upon which you are going to work. This can lead to you becoming petrified to actually mark the surface, because freshly stretched canvas properly primed is not inexpensive. The same goes with good quality drawing paper.
So if it helps when you are in that situation, just get some cheap materials begin the process with those cheaper materials and see where that goes. It may lead to the first step which you can then go on to make also on these canvases and pieces of paper, where you just go headlong into them after doing a trial work out on the cardboard and then, presto! You’ve begun.
