Self-Criticism in art making + Video 02 - Blind Contour Drawing

Last post I said we will talk about the process this time, but I think before explaining the elements in the video, there’s a critical question to be asked. 

Did you criticize?

If you’ve done the exercise (or you haven’t, it doesn’t matter.), did you criticize your work? Or my work? Let’s ask again in a more general term, do you criticize what you do? 

There’e many articles about self-criticism, and here is my opinion on this topic in the context of art and life. First of all we criticize our own creation because we tend to subconsciously compare ourselves to Da Vinci (or other professionals). The trigger is that when we grow up, we are more or less trained to meet the social expectation in our environment, so we look up to those pros or geniuses in the whole world and think we will (or we never will) be like them.

When we try to meet this kind of standards (of others), negative emotions like anger or upset occur, they are products of self-criticism. I think for most people the side effects of self-criticism are well known, but why do we do it anyway? I try to figure it out through reading and my own experience in art making, and I think in order to understand it better, we need to talk a bit about our brain. 

One of the functions of our brain is to save energy for us, to do the “more important things”.

When we make art or when we want to learn something new, it is normal that we feel it’s difficult at the beginning. We literally face psychological challenges and if we want to overcome this difficulty, it will cost us a lot of energy. Now the brain will automatically come up with reasons for convincing us that this is “not important”, which can be the synonym of “not needed in the society”. From this angle, it’s not hard to understand that the word “useless” appears so often during self-criticizing (been there myself countless times).

The brain says “This is stupid and useless; you are not good at this; let’s give up, so we can deal with the more important things”. 

You might agree that it’s very easy to doubt and criticize other people without valid reasons, so it’s the same to do that to ourselves. Thus Doubt and Criticism are the simplest and most effective strategies in saving our energy. That’s why there’s old saying “You are your worst enemy”.

Please let this idea sink in a bit, ask yourself “Does it matter that the society doesn’t want what you do?”

At the end, enjoy a short video of another blind-contour drawing demo with more 3D objects – plant pots. 

Password: JWSL2

Happy Creating!

Next topic: my way of dealing with self-criticism