I struggle creating my art. My inner critic, my demon, wants this to be due to my shortcomings, inability, lack of skill and education. That demon says those artists on YouTube who paint a landscape from blank canvas to finished painting in 30 minutes know far more about painting than I do. Colors are just applied without hesitation. Composition is second nature.

That demon says I’m amateur. None of these things come without deliberation and experimentation. It takes weeks for me to finish paintings. Not because I’m painting the veins in the hand for days or rendering the reflection of fluorescent light on the iris, but because I’m just looking at the painting wondering what comes next, what it needs. Hours of just looking, questioning, trying, and failing. 

I’m tempered against the demon with my ego and my intimate, personal passion for creating. I enjoy painting despite the struggle. I argue that my pieces don’t follow a procedure to achieve some predetermined end. They must be a battle with both my limits and my preconceived ideas of what each painting and subject should be. If it were easy, it wouldn’t contain the emotional, personal strength. It would be a technical achievement only, a testament to skill rather than a conduit for empathy and connection to humanity.

But the demon and the ego are just stories I tell myself, and others, about my work. They’re as true or false as any story.

The work must live on its own, withstand the cold criticism of the viewer, without my story there to explain and protect it. My stories are just my own. The viewer tells their own story. The struggle with the artwork, the battle with the demon, the doubt I hold are mine. The artwork connects best when the story of the viewer and the artwork resonate together. I can watch them find strength in each other, find comfort in each other’s pains and passions and fears, vulnerabilities.

I continue to fight my demon, the cruel inner critic that demands emotions be systematic and passions procedural because that’s what a “professional artist” does and I’m not one of those. My goal is to worry less about these stories and just exist in the process of creating art. In the end I hope it connects people to something powerful within themselves. Capture that resonance of personal experience and greater history, personal loves, pains, and fear.