Introduction to Part III
Welcome back! We’re at the conclusion of this three-part series on imperfection as it relates to arting, particularly equine realism. We’ve come a long way on this journey, having discussed several weighty issues that pertain to the difficulties of making art when perfection is the goal. Because — blorg! What an impossible task! To attempt to make a “perfect” realistic equine piece is literally to forge off into a futile, doomed mission with no end! No wonder why perfectionists tend to spin their wheels so much. Their goal post keeps moving!
It’s said that Leonardo da Vinci quipped, ”Art is never finished, only abandoned.” Whether or not you agree with that, the point is, there comes a time when you just have to quit with this endless pursuit of perfection and call “done” only because you — if you’ve been paying attention — come to realize you simply cannot produce perfection. It’s just not ever in the cards, no matter how hard you try and redo and redo and redo. Maybe you’re exasperated, maybe you’re fried, maybe you’re bored, maybe you’re confused, maybe you just want to be done. Whatever the reason, it’s your inner voice telling you to stop chasing that windmill. Your horse is exhausted. Because perfection, in all its forms, is absolutely impossible in an imperfect world, in an imperfect universe, in an imperfect reality. So stop. But how do we process this release of perfectionism when our pieces have to be as perfect as possible? Well, we’ve explored that theme throughout this series, so let’s bookend it now with two important components to this journey…so let’s just gun it and go!…
The Imperfect Dream
Another thing I’ve learned in over thirty years in this biz is this: Most collectors don’t necessarily want realistic equines — they want dream equines, and that’s a very different order to fill. So despite all their espousing of realism this and realism that, of accuracy here and accuracy there, when push comes to shove, this community tends to choose what tugs at the heartstrings and the imagination over what tugs at the technicalities. They want to be enchanted more than anything else and reminded why they love horses in the first place. It's understandable. But I see it all the time, even today when ABC judging is the dominant evaluation platform. But here’s the thing: If you can ping both, that’s where the real magic happens! So aim for that! The gist of it is though: Don’t just focus on technical accuracies and workmanship — those are simply the incidental baselines to our art form, the “givens” that have to be there anyway. What you should also be focused on in equal measure are three additional things:
- Narrative: What story are you telling in your piece? What sort of context, backstory, theme, or overarching tone or theme does this piece embody?
- Heart-grabbing: Does my piece speak to the heart and soul of the viewer in equal measure? It should remind people of why they love equines in the first place.
- Novelty: What new territory am I exploring with this piece whether a new way to express technicalities, your knowledge base, skillset, narrative, composition, concept, technique, media or what not? Seek to push yourself in some new direction with each piece.
So all this is to say that what the community says it wants isn’t necessarily what it wants. At its core, despite all the brouhaha and espoused demands, it really just wants to be inspired, to be reminded of why equines are our focus, our muse, and our passion. So if your work can do that along with technical accuracy, you’ve got it on lock.
Recommended reading:
Top Hat n’ Tails: Steppin’ Out With Style
The Imperfect Plan
To get all these sensibilities in tow and moving forwards, we often do better with a plan, a map to get us to our goals. The thing is though, each artist must plot their own course according to their individual needs, so every map is different. But there are certain myths when it comes to map-making because what we definitely don’t need are:
- A perfect map or plan
- A perfect, flawless portfolio
- A perfect, amazing CV
- A five-year strategy or business plan
- Being “ready” to start
Nope. You see, all that will build and morph along the way on its own plus if we stick too hard to a fixed route on our map, we can find ourselves in the weeds pretty quickly all the same. In fact, our first maps can be wrong, be off-course, or become outdated to what we’re evolving into. And stay open to the random opportunity that may seem out of left field, but segues with our Voice nicely. So the trick here is to keep our map buildable and adaptable to our ongoing evolution while not betraying our Voice. So on that note, here’s what we do actually need for your map:
- A direction or goal: What do you want to accomplish in your art career? Be honest. And your direction can be a bit murky as it will probably morph along the way.
- Your Voice: Your driving sensibilities that dictate which routes you take, even the nature of your destination.
- Adaptability: Your resilience and ability to bounce around lets you reroute, get into new lanes, backtrack, and find new on-ramps and off-ramps as you need them.
- Keep showing up: Participate in the community, with your peers and colleagues and partners, make good use of social media, and engage your art in the happenings going on. But even more, keep showing up for your work — keep making it no matter what. Indeed, your love, perseverance, patience, determination, innovations, growth, curiosity, and courage will come into play in a big way as you keep on, failing forwards and growing.
- Identification of guideposts: Who are your mentors, teachers, peers, colleagues, and partners who not only correct your map, but point you in the right direction, even new directions.
- Doing the work: Hard work, sacrifice, diligence, and follow through to completion are all necessary to walk the Path. Not “someday,” not when you feel “ready,” not when things are “perfect,” not when you have more money, time, or confidence, or skill — now. The truth is there is no perfect time to start, so just start now! Confusion you can fix with information, fear you can fix with courage, roadblocks you can shove aside with help, but procrastination is 100% on you and will 100% burn your map to ashes. You’ve got to do the work.
- Willingness: How willing are you to learn, to make the sacrifices, to put in the hard work, to question and challenge (especially yourself), and above all, to fail and still keep going? Your powerful will is the fuel you’ll need to get where you want to go.
- Curiosity: How much are you jazzed by learning new things? How pro-active are you in self-education and expanding your knowledge base and skillset? How prone are you to challenge your own conventions, biases, blindspots, and sensibilities? Are you eager to follow your curiosity or do you tend to choose safe comfort zones and convention, particularly your own?
- Humility: Are you able to be a newb again…and again and again and again as needed? Are you okay with failing spectacularly in full public view? Can you process embarrassment, shame, mistakes, bad art days, and other artistic oopsies effectively, especially in public view? And even more, can you always give credit where credit is due? Are you apt to openly recognize the contributions of others to your map? Remember the adage, “Be nice to everyone on the way up, because you’ll meet them again on the way down.”
That’s what will serve you best on your Way, that’s what will get you to your destination on the most flexible, responsive, and effective Path. Because once you’ve given yourself permission to learn, to make mistakes, to be a newb, to question, to feel awkward and uncomfortable, and to always try again, you’ve laid down a solid foundation for growth, exploration, and building an exciting studio. Because all those other things like contracts, licensing, CVs, portfolios, agents, gallery relationships and all the rest will pop up on their own along the way, but if you don’t have those foundation gumptions from the beginning, it’s just a self-sabotaging endeavor. In a nutshell then, the question really isn’t “Am I ready?,” it’s “Am I willing?” So, are you?
The Imperfect Art
All said and done, we should realize that realism is an intrinsically imperfect art form. No matter how hard we try, no matter how skilled we are, no matter how big our knowledge base, no matter how long we’ve been doing this, no matter how keen our Sight, no matter how many classes we take, we’ll always — always — fall short of our mark. Why? Well, it’s pretty simple: Only Nature can create a perfect horse, only DNA can achieve perfection. Yet even then, no horse is perfect! Like thumb through an auction magazine to see the plethora of individuality in the equine form, just like us — so who’s to say which one is perfect? And hooooo boy, ask a group of people what makes a perfect horse and watch the flamewar start! Yet to add more fuel to the fire, even Nature is flawed through all its variations, genetic errors, mutations, and all the rest — and much of it still works all the same, just like our art! So one can say that our actual attainable goal is to achieve as much realism as we can muster to trick the eye just enough into believing it’s more than just an HSO (horse-shaped object), in the full knowing that means different things to different people. Like someone may look at a painted sculpture and be fooled in an instant while another may look at it and immediately see all the illusion-popping errors. The more esoteric those errors get though, the less likely they’re going to be identified. But there’s always a tell, that’s the point. So the goal isn’t to achieve perfection, but enough accuracy to do the job, and that’s significantly more attainable…thank goodness!
Then we have the difficulty with our methods and media — our workmanship. Heck, simply achieving a smooth basecoat or white pattern is enough to drive us up a tree! But here’s the thing: Our workmanship has to be even more on point only because more people are simply going to recognize a brushstrok-y white blanket or a missed bit of flashing than they are a missing tuberosity on the knee or a laterally bent lumbar section. It’s just a lot more obvious to more people. And here perhaps perfection is most insidious only because a perfect prep job is possible — you simply have to remove all the flashing and casting relics, right? That’s doable, given enough patience, gumption, and technique. Likewise, a smooth basecoat is attainable with an airbrush while smooth white patterns are doable with the right brushwork and paint consistency, making them also fully within our capabilities. No wonder why so many truly struggle with prepwork and painting! It’s a very different bar to clear when perfection is no longer intrinsically unattainable! Argh! So here perhaps we really need to apply our wabi-sabi sensibilities to keep ourselves not only sane, but happy in our arting because there comes a point of diminishing returns. You see, when our brain starts associating arting with frustration, disillusion, and other bad vibes, we won’t be arting for much longer. Double argh! Yet here’s the real crux of the matter — we need to stop bullying ourselves and each other with perfection. Give people room to enjoy making their art! If that means they missed a brushstroke but still had a blast painting that pattern, then let it be. If they missed a bit of sanding scratches, but they love their piece, then let it be. If they got a bit of dog hair in their hoof paint, but the hoof still looks good, then let it be. Sure this equation is very different with working artists who do have to deliver as close to perfect as possible, but the casual artist? Ease up on them! Let them have their joy in their more casual way.
Nevertheless, it’s important to finish what we start for follow through. Now it’s okay to have several in-progress projects going, but we really do need to finish them at some point, especially if we’re a working artist. Like it feels good to put that period on the end of that very long sentence for our own sake, for our art’s sake, and to move onto other things with a clean slate. And each piece can only teach us so much and it’s time to finish it up and move onto a new lesson. Yet even so, it’s okay to putter around in our art from time to time, a lot of great art has been created by puttering around. But it does become a problem if that's a pattern of behavior if this is our livelihood. Absolutely, a working artist finishes most of what they start not because it’s easy, but because it’s hard — because they have to. They have to start, they have to save it from the mistakes, and they require that follow through no matter what. But this is the surprising thing: This pressure is actually pretty handy because it forces us to, as Tim Gunn would say, “Make it work.” And sometimes in art, forcing things to save a piece, to finish it — heck, to even start a new piece — can actually lead to discovery, innovation, and the excavation of personal or artistic issues that ultimately improve matters in our long game.
But boil it all down and this is the imperfect irony about our niche art form: Realism isn’t as objective as we may think it is. It’s certainly more objective than, say, conformation, breed type, and artistic appeal, but in and of itself, technical accuracy has its own degree of subjectivity, especially when it comes to the gestalt response. Sure, someone quite knowledgeable may see the technical errors, but if that piece consistency wins big, sells big, becomes famous…as many technically flawed pieces have…what actually matters most? Oh, the conundrum! So again, just do the best you can on your learning curve, and let the chips fall where they may — and you just keep on, artin’ on. That’s all any of us can do.
Recommended reading:
Finally Finito: When To Call Done
The Unreality of Realism: Walking the Tightrope Between Fact and Fiction Part I - Part V (click "newer post" to go to the next Part)
Keepin’ It Real: Ways To Support Artists Beyond The Dollar
Demonslaying Part I - Part VI (click "newer post" to go to the next Part)
DABPPRR: Equine Realism Easily Organized
The Master’s Edge: The Importance Of Quality Workmanship
Twenty-Five Tips For Preserving Your Joy In the Studio
Conclusion
Perhaps now it’s clear that creating perfect art in this crazy ol’ imperfect world is a bit of a self-imposed delusion, isn’t it? It's kinda self-sabotaging in a way. In a sense, it's a bit more about turning into Don Quixote with his windmills than gaining superpowers of impeccable talent, skill, and vision. In fact, if we dig deeper, we find that perfectionism isn’t just a desire to do well — we all wish to do that, even those who have put perfection in its place. Nope. Rather, it’s in equal measure a fear of failing. A fear of shame, humiliation, a fear of not being enough. In this strange way then, perfectionism is a kind of love-hate dichotomy: Love for our art, arting, and our subject, but hate of shame, embarrassment, frustration, and failure. How curious! How imperfect a relationship!
But with some reality injected into this delusion, some reason infused into this preposterous proposition, and some self-love smashed into the self-loathing perfectionism can provoke, we can’t only learn to accept our imperfect art, we can actually come to embrace it for the marvel it is. What’s more, we can reconcile and make peace with this imperfect world that just never seems to stop testing our patience, resilience, and sense of humor.
Because it’s important to make peace with imperfection, to realize that we can go about our arting business joyfully, skillfully, and purposely even when that impossible carrot of perfection dangles in front of us, always pulling us forward in its maddening way. That we can find satisfaction even when we’re destined to always pull up short. Yes, it’s true. Because, yes, you can find that renewed kind of relationship with your art, too. Because there are three truths we mustn’t ignore. First, art should first be fun! It’s gotta be a true pleasure, if you’re doing it right. Second, art should be a sanctuary for you, a rebalancing that brings you inner peace and solace. And third, arting is good for you! It’s good for your mind, your heart, your soul, your health, your guts, and your sensibilities. If we don’t make peace with imperfection though, chances are we may never even start arting in the first place, denying ourselves of those beneficial truths…and for little good reason.
So assuage those fears imperfection fires up with a goodly dose of love, curiosity, courage, and gumption to just start creating some art! It can be something incredibly small or simple, too, nothing fancy or involved. Cut out a paper horse and glue on some yarn and glitter! Done! Sew up a stuffed horse with button eyes! Done! Prep a $10 Breyer and paint it chestnut! Done! Start with baby steps! But just start. This imperfect world desperately needs your imperfect art, and together we can actually find a new kind of perfection in the way only love, beauty, and inspiration can conjure up together! So make a friend of imperfection and you’ll find not only a gentle, nonjudgmental companion, but one who accepts you for exactly who you are and your art for exactly what it is, gladly and openly.
"You use a glass mirror to see your face. You use works of art to see your soul.”
- George Bernard Shaw
