This is the Messy Middle
Curiosity and Play, you get to drive. Shame, and Perfectionism, be quiet!
When I posted two weeks ago, I confessed to being a perfectionist and to how that lead to a more than three months gap between posts. You can read that post, if you want, by clicking the link below.
I didn’t want to repeat that this time, so for this post, I’m writing about where I am right now - which is the Messy Middle. What you see in the above photo is literally what my desk looks like (as I write this ) today.
I’m in the middle of creating designs for a tide-pool themed calendar. I understand that many seasoned artist have their calendars out RIGHT NOW! And when I learned about this last week, I did consider, for a nano-second, throwing in the towel. But I immediately identified this as another way Perfectionism shows up for me. “You got the timing wrong. It’s too late. Just call it quits for the year because if you can’t do it “right” then you shouldn’t be doing it at all,” my Perfectionism says.
And practically speaking, it may be late in the game to grab the highest earning potential for my project, “But,” I say back to Perfectionism, “what does it REALLY matter?” I have no big financial commitment to create this calendar on someone else’s timeline or to make a certain amount of sales. The only commitment that really matters right now is to my creative self. I will get valuable art practice and the technical skills and marketing knowledge I learn along the way can be applied moving forward. Besides, haven’t you ever bought a calendar late in the year? or in January even February? I have! So onward!
I really enjoy sea life, specifically the beach-ecology - the algae, the small animals like barnacles, limpets, snails, and slugs, the many colorful rocks and shells. I even enjoy sponges which can come in bright oranges and purples. These are all subjects that I love to draw and paint.
My go-to medium is watercolor. The photo above is a piece I did in early July. I knew that I wanted my calendar art to retain the softness that watercolor can provide. So I started out doing what I usually do which is to try out different shapes with my brush and different color combinations with the paints I have.
I’ve painted seaweed a lot but I didn’t want my calendar to be just about seaweed. There are lots of animals I want to include too. The two-page sketchbook spread above is an example of some risk taking - moving away from what is most familiar toward newness. I painted many, many pages like these. But after a few days, I hit a wall. I also like printing with hand carved stamps so when I hit that metaphorical creative wall, I dug out some stamps I had made months and months ago and decided to layer the stamps on blobs of paint.
The finished piece is above and you can watch a video of this very simple process by clicking here.
So right now, these two - printing layered on watercolor - are what I’m playing with. I’m mixing and matching and layering. I’m asking myself questions like “How can I create that shape or texture (of an urchin test or a nudibranch) with stamps vs. with my paint brush?” And asking myself “Do I like this result?” The photos I’m including in the remainder pf this post illustrate different stages of experimentation and play.
Going back to my opening, paragraph - why did I capitalize Messy Middle? Because, through reading what many seasoned artists have written about the creative process, I’ve come to learn that the middle stage of a creative project appears to be universally messy and so I think deserves those big letters. It is also literally messy - as the photo of my desktop illustrates - and figuratively messy in that the process is not linear. I can say from my own experience, that there’s a lot of “messy,” uncomfortable emotions swirling around at this stage too. However, There’s something encouraging about being in a highly uncomfortable situation and realizing that it’s all normal, others before me have made their way through to the other side, and we’ll all go through a similar experience again and again.
In the early days of posting my art on Instagram, I did several weeks of posting a video showing what was on my desk and describing the project I was in the middle of. I called this The Monday Mess on my Desk. I did this with intention. First, I wanted to banish feelings of shame over not having the technical skills to make the art that I was aspiring toward, of “not being as good” as some other artist I was admiring, of being a beginner again.1 Posting any of my art is still an exercise in being okay with where my skills are at right now.
Second, so much of what I was seeing on social media was art that looked polished and beautiful. In small doses, this gave me inspiration. Sometimes, though, “compare despair”2 set in and I found myself feeling discouraged. I wanted to push back on that cultural stream and pull back the curtain, so to speak, to show the part that comes before that beautiful piece.
I picked up this ethic, in part, after reading Austin Kleon’s book, Show Your Work. There’s so much in this book that relates to the messy creative process and to showing your process, especially in our digital age, that I found it hard to choose a short quote for you here so I’m simply going to recommend that you read it.3
The way I see it, the whole of living our lives is one big, long, messy middle and we’re all going to come to the end of this creative life some day. I don’t want perfectionism to get in the way of living this life as joyfully as possible. Paraphrasing what Elizabeth Gilbert writes in Big Magic, I like to say, “Shame, you may be along for the ride but you do not get to drive!” Courage, Curiosity and Play are much better companions for this trip.
Before I finished this post, I paused and visited the Seattle Asian Art Museum and I am glad for it because one of the exhibits there was a piece of modern art by the artist Dr. Chila Kumari Singh Burman made up of neon lights depicting what I saw as an amiable monster and the words I’M A MESS above it. It turns out, that amiable monster was the artist’s depiction of the goddess Kali, who, depending on the source (I did a quick google search) is the goddess of death and destruction or/and the goddess of protection, creativity, and time. I think all of the above is relevant, really, in a creative life. I might say more about this in a future post.
Thanks for reading A Making Life! Are you in the Messy Middle of a project? I’d love to read about it.
Sincerely,
Alma
In sharing about my Making Life and all it’s ups and downs, I hope to inspire others like me to embrace a creative life. If you enjoy reading this newsletter and it is your first time, I hope you will become a subscriber. It’s free!
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I was a public school educator for close to 17 years and counting my work in the private sector, more than 25 years. Consequently, I was very used to being in the position of “expert” before I resigned. That was just two years ago.
I first heard this term used on the podcast, Art Juice, hosted by Alice Sheridan and Louise Fletcher. I love this podcast.
I recommend reading the other books in this series, Steal Like and Artist and Keep Going as well.
"is one big, long, messy middle" = TRUTH.
I'm reminded, too, how much I LOVE seeing the study sketches and drafts of bigger works at retrospective shows. As much as it can be painful, I love process. Thanks for sharing yours. ❤️