No, I’m not talking about feeling “good enough” for anyone else. That’s another topic for another blog idea, and that could be a long…um…opinionated one.
I’m talking about the arts, and the fear of reaching the point of redundancy with the stuff I turn out. That can happen very easily when you’ve been doing anything for so long that you get to feeling you’re at the top of your game.
You’re not. I’m not. Nobody is. As soon as we start thinking we know it all, that’s when we cease to grow one more iota. That’s not where I want to be. My ambition is a lofty one, to be sure. I want to become a master painter. I want to put stuff out there that will drop some jaws. So, I keep taking art courses even though I’ve been selling my art for some years now. The last few courses I took were to gain a deeper understanding of “perspective,” and then I wanted to dive into graphite pencil art, and then coloured pencil art, and then I studied the anatomy of the human form in excruciating detail, so as to master painting or drawing the human figure. Thanks to Leonardo da Vinci, I won’t have to acquire any cadavers to peel apart layer by layer so as to know how we’re put together. He’s did that for us a very long time ago, but today we can still learn from the notes he left behind. If you’re an artist or an aspiring artist, you may want to check out a book called, “Leonardo’s Anatomical Drawings,” from the Dover Art Library. You can get it on Amazon. So…I studied a course based on his notes, and my goodness, that was a mind-buzz!
The most recent course I studied was for the purpose of learning more about shading and color mixing for acrylic painting. Acrylics “dry down,” which means that the color tends to get a little faded out once the paint dries. It loses its vibrancy. I wanted to learn how to get around that. So I did learn that and a great deal more about realism in painting. The portrait above was the assignment for the final class. It’s too bad you can’t blow this up on your screen because if you could, you’d even see skin texture behind the shaded glasses, and see the definition in the irises, and so on. Great course.
What I want to do is encourage you to keep moving forward. Keep learning. Keep looking for different angles to learn from, when it comes to whatever you’re passionate about. For me, I don’t think I will ever say, “I’m good enough,” when it comes to any of the art forms that I delve into. As long as there is still something — anything! — to dig deeper into, I will never be good enough.
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