Tapping into creative waters can be difficult enough. We’re often trying to extract music, prose, photography, etc. from what sometimes feels like a muddy, or even dry, stream. So it’s a brilliant feat of magic when we can see our inspirations and artistic ideas come to fruition. But what happens next can determine whether we create art, or turn away from it.
As artists, we often have the desire to share our art – sometimes to get feedback or an opinion from someone we trust, or someone whose perspective we value. Whereas there’s nothing wrong with asking for feedback, how many times have we shifted our creative process, approach to the piece, or even abandoned it altogether when that feedback is negative? In that case, we have taken our highly personal statement and convictions and replaced it with a desire to please. Or worse yet, that feedback made us stop believing in our original artistic idea. Great art can be reflective of many things, but we must not allow it to be so fragile that it can’t survive a critical blow. Some of the most successful artists had to endure reviews and critics calling their art “bad” or worse. If the extremely successful band Black Sabbath listened to their nay-sayers, they might have never left Birmingham.
Continue reading “The Art of Conviction and Confidence”
