I’ve been sculpting equines realistically for over thirty years. Hyper-focused, disciplined, perfectionist, driven. And it’s not like I ever went halfway. I’ve actively worked to refine my abilities with a single-minded mania, investing heavily in references, workshops, materials, and loads of other educational resources until my brain cells popped like tobiko and my wallet groaned in agony. And so my skills were honed, my confidence high, my motivation at maximum…nothing was beyond my grasp.
Until In Dreams.
In just 17 days, this simple, seemingly straightforwards bust blew up thirty years of effort right in my face like Wiley E. Coyote’s Acme dynamite, and I was left carbonized, dazed, desperate, and destroyed. I even lost my eyebrows.
In Dreams broke me.
Honestly, this bust just crushed me and nearly ended my career. I cried. I begged. I cursed. I lamented. I questioned. I doubted. I cried again. And I nearly gave up. As in gave up everything. I nearly walked away. I truly came to believe my Muse had left me and that was it, I was done. My career was over. I actually entertained the idea of a new life working at the local Michael’s instead. I’m not kidding. Sorting fake flowers and stacking canvases was sounding pretty good at that point.
But it was devastating beyond that though. Since so much of my identity is wrapped up in being an artist, I was left a wreck of myself. A mere bust had put me in a very real personal crisis and I was left in ruins, wracked with doubt, confusion, anguish, anxiety, and despair. I even worried if this debacle would trigger another breakdown like the one before my descent into six years of suicidal clinical depression. I could see that dreadful edge of the bottomless drop-off — I was on it. I’d never been pushed to this bleak point before as a function of my skills and it was a terrifying landscape for someone who had such a solid grasp on their purpose. Oh, I’ve been down this path a few steps, but never like this, never actually hitting the wall smack dab, full force. I was shook to my core as an artist and as a person.
But sometimes — just sometimes — the Universe gifts us with destruction. Sometimes we have to be blown apart to be rebuilt into something new with more room to grow.
You see, I had to unlearn 30+ years of Seeing which is far harder than it sounds. Here’s the gist of it: The very nature of our reality is determined by our perception filter, it’s how we interpret reality, and so, quite literally, our perception is our reality. Here’s the kicker though: We are each unique and so we each have a unique perception filter and so a unique perception of reality. This is why every artist can paint the same bowl of lemons realistically and each painting will still be different. That's to say, our perception filter isn’t objective — it’s subjective. Now in art, this individuality manifests as our artistic habits, style, aesthetics, and blindspots, those unique quirks that make our art distinctive. (For an in-depth discussion of this topic of perception, check out my blog series The Unreality Of Realism; Walking the Tightrope Between Fact and Fiction Part I-V.) So for some inexplicable reason, 30+ years of encrusted perception quirks came to a head with In Dreams and kerplewied my reality. Bang! Said another way, my perception filter not only vapor locked, it imploded.
You see — nothing clicked. Not. One. Thing. For 17 days it was failure after failure after failure. Resculpting the same areas a dozen times. And still with failure after failure after failure. Well, let me rephrase that because it was worse — after pseudo-success after pseudo-success after pseudo-success. In other words, everything looked bang-on perfect to my Eye as I completed her — awesome, right? Nope. Because when I compared those areas all to the references, they were still wrong or not quite there. And no matter how I redid things, they always pulled up short. This systemic contradiction pointed to a serious flaw in the way I was Seeing and to me that’s Defcon 1. And, of course, confusion, frustration, and anxiety set in (and oh, that always delightful inner critic), amplifying with each failed go-round until I was a worn down nub of self-loathing and despondency. Complicating matters, too, my schizoaffective disorder, riled from the stress of this, amplified those voices in my head to become another very insistent and pointed chorus of self-inflicted vitriol I couldn’t escape. Then finally after the nth failed try — since I lost count — I broke. I cried and sat there hating myself and came thiiiiis close to just walking away from a 30+ year career.
See, the thing with some artists — as it is with me — is that when we get to failure of this magnitude, it becomes deeply personal. It’s no longer just a challenge to conquer, an obstacle to tackle, a problem to solve, but you can’t just walk away from it or let it slide either. Instead, it becomes a direct reflection on who I am as a person and an artist. There’s something seriously wrong with my skills so there has to be something wrong with me, right? And even more, that because the failure is so egregious, whatever is wrong with my abilities must indicate that I’ve reached the limit of my potential, yes? That was it for me then, and failing well short of the goals I aimed for my entire life. Life as I knew it was over and it would end on a sour note. Maybe that’s too much silly drama — it probably is — but we can’t stop our emotional thoughts, can we? They just happen. So there I was, an utter lame loser with no future in this genre anymore and worse, no hope in the one thing that meant so much to me my entire life.
But taking my own advice from Demonslaying 101 (oh, the irony!), I took a breath and tried one more time.
Because if you know me, you know there’s one thing stronger than my despair: My stubbornness. Weapons-grade. Just ask hubby and you’ll get an eye roll. So I may have been smacked down and gutted, but blast it — I was getting back up again. And if that meant unlearning everything I knew, then I was throwing it all under the bus. But I knew I needed a break to step back and regain my emotional composure. I also needed to let my subroutines work the problem without pressure or expectation. Know it or not, we're always learning subconsciously and it's whether we keep that door open for this that determines a large portion of our progress. So I let her sit for eight long months, occasionally peeking at her as my subroutines processed new concepts and ideas, checking them on her. Gradually, new things started to lock into place, new ways of Seeing structure that illuminated old errors and new pathways. Sometimes dumping everything we think we know is just what the sculpture ordered! Because I realize now that I had stopped listening to her, I had stopped following where she wanted to go because at that point in my skills, I just couldn't hear, I just couldn't follow.
So in May 2022, I was finally ready to get my toes wet again, truly listening to her this time. Needing a clean slate then, I dremeled near everything off and restarted with the determination not to sculpt by what “felt right” or what I knew. I dumped my entire belief system: My habits, formulas, all I was taught and everything I’d learned about anatomy and structure, even my entire mental library. Instead, I determined to sculpt completely outside my comfort zone no matter how odd it looked, how unfamiliar it seemed, and no matter how uncomfortable it felt. I put my perception in a blender and hit frappé.
And it worked. By gum — it worked! Right out of the gate, it all worked!
Now one could say, “Hey, why didn’t you just sculpt what was there in the first place?” Well, see…it doesn’t really work that way. Even in objective technical realism, the human brain introduces preferences, biases, errors, formula, and blindspots. It can’t help it. Let’s backtrack a little bit…it’s easily argued that the human brain is really just a highly sophisticated pattern recognition machine. By the mere act of processing something to recreate it then, the brain is automatically identifying and duplicating patterns best it can — even making up patterns where none exist to fill gaps. In the process, it develops habitual patterns to get the job done more efficiently and to be able to make predictions and deductions. We call this learning. And for equine realism, one of those patterns is the anatomical blueprint, from the points of articulation to the angled planes and curves to the layout of the muscles to the formation of the veins, and so on. Everything about the equine’s structure can be broken down into a series of patterns and so the closer we get to objectively expressing them, the more realistic our work reads. Yet since each artist has a unique perception of reality, we also have a unique set of recognized anatomical patterns. In this then, no artist actually renders what’s really there, they can only ever render their own interpretation of what’s really there, and that interpretation is biased by the mere act of processing it. Think of it as Schrödinger’s Arting. So put all those individually unique patterns together and we end up with what we think of as artistic style, the aesthetic pattern if you will, something which makes each artist’s work as distinctive as a fingerprint. And know it or not, even the most clinical depictions are stylized when you know what you’re looking at.
So when I was able to shift my entire aesthetic paradigm — when I was able to replace my perception filter with a brand new one and therefore perceive new patterns — that actually involved quite a bit of a shake up. I sat there marveling then, amazed at how easily it all came now and discovered that it was my old perception filter that had been holding me back. Everything also looked more realistic than my work ever had, at least to my new Eye, it just had more “organic chaos,” it was looser and “naturally messier” than my previous more rigid interpretations would allow. Plus structures were more accurate, planes more authentic, proportion more aligned. In short, I had learned new ways to play with the rules. Now granted, these were relatively little things — esoteric, geeky things really — but to me, it was a whole new world. And even more, it was like this whole new way of Seeing had been ready to go all along only it was waiting for me to get a freaking dang clue.
Because what I realize now was that my implosion wasn’t due to a lack of ability, it wasn’t a plateau, it wasn’t a failure, it wasn't the end of my potential — I had been on the cusp of a breakthrough. It was growing pains. I was finally ready to shed my old skin but the only way to do that was with a shock to the system to knock it loose. To do that then, the Universe nuked me from orbit (it’s the only way to be sure) because that thick 30+ year encrustation of patterns was so closely tied to me, there was no way to blast them without blowing me up too. Sometimes, breakthroughs can be brutal.
But now on the other side, I’m profoundly grateful. Not only did my sculpting take a huge leap forwards, but I learned quite a bit about myself in the process, some of it good and some of it bad. The best thing I learned was that no matter how awful things could get, there was that trusty seed of hope that, though pulverized and paltry, could still germinate the gumption to try again. That deep down I really did trust myself despite seemingly hopeless odds. I also discovered that I wasn’t a fearful, fatalist soul, I had a hopeful heart. That’s very reassuring! I was far more powerful than I thought I was, too, and that I could draw from this well of tactical stubbornness to give me that nitro boost when I needed it. I was also reminded that the only thing that was between me and success was me. If I could push beyond my limiting thoughts — and that inner critic that was trying to hold me back — I could achieve my goal. I learned as well that I need to be more vigilant in my “artistic awareness,” that I need to keep better tabs on my habits and that I should never get too comfortable with what I was doing. Indeed, Dreams was trying to get me to let go, but in my initial fear I grasped harder and that was the source of the problem. I also have to remind myself more often of my “why,” not my “what.” In other words, I need to remember why I’m arting in the first place and lean on that more heavily because I almost forgot.
Now as for the bad — yikes. I definitely learned my emotional limits, my breaking point. Now granted, it took a lot to get there, but it was there and it was a bad scene. I definitely want to avoid that again! Even worse, I learned just how darned cruel, bitter, and vindictive my inner critic could really be which was alarming. That scares me. Is there a part of me deep down that really believes those things? Perhaps so. Gosh — I need to work harder on self-respect and self-love. And I have to work to disconnect my self-worth from my art a little bit more. I need to remind myself that while I am my art in a sense, art is what I do as well — that my failure wasn’t necessarily a reflection on me personally, it was just something that happened as a function of growth, as part of an overarching process. But perhaps worst of all, I realized just how much I was willing to sacrifice to achieve a goal — too much of my mental well-being, my health, my balance, even time with my family and friends. That was understandable, knowing my single-minded manic nature, but it was still very wrong of me. I need to be far more mindful of that.
In line with all this and my efforts to live with schizoaffective disorder then, I identify very strongly with the Phoenix, of rebirth from the ashes. My emergence, my psychological rebirth, from clinical depression through Ketamine therapy is an obvious example. Through that therapy, I was restored back to factory settings and rebooted as Sarah.2, literally saving my life. But now this creative breakthrough came out of nowhere, artistically burning me away to rise again as Sarah.3. To think that a simple bust had so much power. In Dreams has easily been the single most trying piece I’ve ever done yet also the single biggest triumph and most satisfying art thing I’ve accomplished so far. Is she my best work so far? Oh, I don’t know — I leave that for time to decide. But she’s definitely my best effort! And it was all because she was teaching me so much so fast and in my reactionary fear — in the form of frustration and doubt — I was desperately holding onto the very things that held me back…yet that was part of the process, too. Sometimes our creative tectonic plates simply get stuck and need to violently jolt loose. What a beautiful disaster. I was also reminded that things happen in their own time. It just wasn't the right time, that first time around. Don't force, fail, and then make the worst assumptions. Workaround. Be patient. Know that your brain is working the problem in its own way and trust that it'll all work out. "If it's not okay, it's not the end," said John Lennon. The funny thing is though that to most folks, In Dreams is just going to seem like an everyday bust. Big woo, right? But to me, she represents a marker between my old skin and my new skin, another personal landmark piece.
So why am I sharing all this? Because maybe you can learn something useful from it, too. Maybe it can help if you ever get stuck on a piece or feel down about your creativity, even yourself. Maybe it can help you off a cliff, to fail forwards rather than simply falling flat on your face and giving up. It might remind you that sometimes what seems like a wall is really a door you can't see yet...wait for the key. That perhaps, too, it will reassure you that failure never really is the final story so don’t let it have the last word. "Success is not final, failure is not fatal: it is the courage to continue that counts," said Winston Churchill. Most of all though, that taking a deep breath and trying one more time is an act of tremendous hope and rebellion with a huge pay off because you just never know what a piece has in store for you. Be hopeful, trust yourself, and most of all, be kind to yourself. You’re stronger than you know, more talented than you believe, and your work is more worthwhile than you could ever imagine. Fight for it.
“Success is not built on success. It's built on failure. It's built on frustration.
Sometimes it’s built on catastrophe.”
~ Sumner Redston