The Ugly Painting

I am currently taking Find Your Joy taster course by British abstract artist, Louise Fletcher and 'just happened' to come across this post in my drafts folder written a couple of years ago. It still resonates with me, so I decided to go ahead and make it available to the readers.

Many would agree that one of the biggest barriers to creativity is pressure - whether internal or external - to be perfect. 

To make beautiful paintings every day, every single time.

To write meaningful well-crafted poems, or stories, or blog entries... every single time. 

To produce a jaw-dropping, awe-inspiring masterpiece day in day out. 

This mindset is so destructive to creative process that it must be addressed. Faced head-on. And eventually... brushed off and ignored.  

Nobody - I mean nobody - can sustain that kind of superior creative productivity over any respectable length of time. 

I am not saying that taming the dragon of perfectionism is easy, that there would be no backsliding or injuries to our ego or anything like that. But the outcome is well-worth it!

It may not work for everyone but I found that being very intentional about making something ugly can get us well along the way of enjoying unencumbered creativity.

Today, we are not making anything pretty, or beautiful, or fine. 

Today we are making... an ugly painting. 

Ugly poem. Ugly story. Ugly blog post.

I know, it's totally counter-intuitive, but as evidenced by countless artists, it truly works. 

Vast majority of my writing is largely garbage. As I continue to practice this craft, every once in a long while something surprisingly good comes out of my pen. 

In the similar way, I have an entire stack of ugly paintings cluttering our home. They are always handy when I feel like I just want to push some paint around and see what happens. This is fun! I am learning! Wow, this is neat... or cool... or crappy. 

With all the stress plaguing our world, we all need a safe place of exploration, messiness and ugly, that sometimes, surprisingly, produces something good. Actually, really good. 

Having a safe place like that doesn't only reduce stress. It also relieves the pressure from the creative process, allowing room for actual enjoyment of the moment, blissfully free from the need to 'deliver results'. 

Strangely enough, results many times follow, unexpected, usually at the time when we least expect it and when we couldn't care less.