The Audacity To Make Something

I think one of the hardest parts of becoming an artist is learning to believe that whatever exists in your head deserves to exist in the world. Before the paint, the exhibitions, the sales, or even the confidence to call yourself an artist, there is this strange act of audacity required to stand in front of an empty canvas and decide that your idea is worth taking up space.

No one can really give you permission to do that. People can encourage you, compliment your work, buy it, hang it on their walls, invite you into galleries, and tell you that you are talented, but none of those things can replace the moment when you decide for yourself that what you see, imagine, remember, question, or have to say is worthy of being made visible.

The longer I make art, the more I realize that becoming an artist has had surprisingly little to do with learning how to paint. Technique matters, of course, but technique can be learned. The harder lesson has been learning how to trust myself enough to follow an idea before I know where it is going, to make the strange thing that only makes sense in my own head, to paint something enormous simply because the idea feels enormous, or to risk ruining a perfectly good canvas because some part of me needs to know what happens if I keep going.

There is a particular kind of freedom that comes when you stop asking whether something will be good and become curious about whether it could be interesting, beautiful, uncomfortable, ridiculous, moving, or completely unlike anything you have made before. I think that is where play enters the work, and play requires its own kind of courage because it asks us to temporarily put down our need to be impressive and allow ourselves to experiment.

Maybe that is what being an artist actually requires more than anything else: the discipline to keep showing up, the curiosity to keep playing, and enough audacity to believe that something living quietly inside your imagination deserves a life outside of you.

Every finished painting is evidence that, at least for a little while, you believed yourself.