The REAL REASON why you can’t PAINT LOOSELY (yet!)

today i want to talk about perfectionism mastering your craft and learning to paint loosely when it comes to creating paintings that feel successful to you and gaining mastery over your preferred way of working with oil paint it's easy to think that you just need to have this one secret tool or supply or technique to make it happen and yeah learning how to hold your brush and control paint and making choices in how you lay down strokes or set yourself up for success those are central parts of making that happen but it's not the only thing you'll need to be mindful of so if you're watching this video i have a good feeling that you'll want to hear how your mindset might be preventing you from making the breakthroughs that you seek in your work so let's talk about what that is the biggest thing that i see holding artists back isn't technique it's perfectionism and i'll explain why first though let's talk a little bit about what perfectionism is i'm actually reading a bit of brene brown's new book atlas of the heart and in it she has a pretty thorough section dispelling common myths about perfectionism and getting clear on exactly what it is and why we experience it so let's rip the band-aid off in this book bernie says perfectionism isn't striving to be our best or working toward excellence healthy striving is internally driven perfectionism is externally driven by a simple but all-consuming question what will people think it may seem counterintuitive but one of the biggest barriers to working toward mastery is perfectionism so in other words perfectionism isn't just related to shame it is where it is born and it has nothing to do with taste or standards so if you might brag that you're a perfectionist or complain about brag that you're a perfectionist or you've been reworking a painting for months that could have been done in an hour because you're a perfectionist i would encourage you to rethink this and this is especially true if you won't let people look at your painting until it's at a certain point i don't just mean kind of having a general standard of like oh i don't like to show people a painting until it's done i mean the painting is done but you won't show it to anybody because it isn't good enough and you're continually reworking it even though it's technically complete so if any of those things sound familiar this video is absolutely for you so i should stipulate that you can absolutely have aesthetic standards for the work that you make that's what brene brown is alluding to when she talks about striving and that being internally driven but at a certain point if you're struggling to reach those aesthetic standards it's better to move on and figure out how to thoughtfully bridge the gap to where you want to be over time rather than spinning your wheels and being stuck in place in an effort to get everything perfect today and this i think comes down to grace you give yourself the grace to be wherever you are today and you encourage yourself to come back to it tomorrow and trust that if you continue to do this you'll exceed the goal you had for this painting this in my experience is what mastery is all about and in her research brene has learned that achieving mastery is fueled by curiosity in viewing failures as opportunities for learning in atlas of the heart she continues by saying quote perfectionism kills curiosity by telling us that we have to know everything or we risk looking less than perfectionism tells us that our mistakes and failures are personal defects so we either avoid trying new things or we barely recover every time we inevitably fall short so instead of being about curiosity perfectionism is really about control she continues by adding that perfectionism is a self-destructive and addictive belief system that fuels this primary thought if i look perfect work perfect live perfectly and do everything perfectly i can avoid or minimize the painful feelings of shame judgment and blame perfectionism is not self-improvement perfectionism is at its core about earning approval and acceptance so that's a really big quote and before i continue i i want to pause and i want to comment that it might be easy to listen to me talk about this and say well that's one thing when you're working at a certain level but like i really do need to push myself or this really isn't good enough or i'm not even at the level yet where this is relevant but the truth is that i have yet to see this not apply to anyone regardless of where they're at and the good news is that regardless of where you're at i know this will help you and in case you needed any extra motivation brene adds that research actually shows that perfectionism hampers the path to success and leads to anxiety and depression so if you're really intrigued by these findings i would encourage you to check out brene's work if you haven't already starting with the gifts of imperfection now i want to talk about what all of this means for this painting and before i jump into that i want to preface this by saying that i work with the best clients um they want to bring their best insights to our conversations and they want to show me their best work but i've seen how what we're talking about in this video can really hold them back and i know that they will probably watch this video so i'm glad that i get to talk about this with all of you including the clients that i work with and this really relates very closely to what we're seeing with this particular painting so let's get into it so when i have my students go through certain exercises like master studies they're often so thrilled with the breakthroughs they have in terms of being able to paint loosely often that is the first time they've put brush to canvas in a way that doesn't feel muddy or overworked but nonetheless captures a likeness and feels painterly in a way that's really new and exciting to them there are some perfectionism traps that come from doing an exercise like this one but generally i find that artists go through an exercise like this fairly confidently and without much fuss the trick however comes to translating what they learned into an original painting so this i found is where the perfectionism really comes in and that's what makes this really relevant to this video what i've learned is that it's really essential to get ahead of perfectionism in this way so when you first start to see yourself mastering a skill it is so tempting to think that you have arrived and i'm not immune to that either as we'll see here in just a minute so if we have a breakthrough painting we wind up expecting every painting after it to be just as good if not better but the thing is that translating new skills really takes time especially when using something like master studies which set you up for success in almost every conceivable way before you take off the proverbial training wheels and you paint your own original composition so let's talk about what this actually looks like and what i see happen here so first we have a breakthrough while completing a painting exercise then we're excited to jump into the next piece and repeat our success we're on cloud nine but we're not attuned to all the ways in which we aren't set up to succeed in that painting yet and don't have the same level of support that we had when doing the original exercise that went so well so for instance if you're coming off of a master study you're missing a composition that you already love and a guide of how to put down every loose painterly brush stroke without overworking the piece while still capturing what you need to capture in that painting or for example if you're coming out of a workshop where you made a really great painting you love when you go back to your own studio you might be missing the great model setup or still life composition that was set out for you by the artist teaching that workshop or you may go from working from life to working from a photograph that lacks the interesting lighting and value pattern and edges or color that you could easily see when you were working from life and so then as a result your next painting feels frustrating by comparison and you're tempted to rework it until you feel it matches the standard that you set during your breakthrough or else you feel disappointed and from everything i've learned about mastering one's craft that's pretty unfair but perhaps more importantly it's counterproductive and the painting i'm working on in this video is a great testament to that so this painting that you're seeing comes after a recent series of me practicing new skills in my work i identified the skill that i wanted to practice which was loosening up by intentionally working to lose or completely ignore certain contours and edges in my work once i had that skill in mind i completed a master copy of a carolyn anderson portrait to help me develop a feel for what it would be like to accomplish these things in my own work and after i created that piece i made the portrait that you saw in a recent youtube video now here i should pause and i should say i was so excited when i finished this carolyn anderson master study it really did feel like a breakthrough to me and although i was aware of all the things i'm talking about in this video it really was hard not to get so excited about the second piece because i thought i've got it i know how i'm gonna bring all of these qualities into my next painting but if you've watched that youtube video or you just look at this painting up on the screen right now you'll notice that it doesn't have the same edges or looseness or paint texture from the master copy but it was a step in a positive direction and i think at this point many painters would stop and feel frustrated which is entirely normal but i've done this enough times and witnessed it enough times to know that this painting wasn't about getting it perfect it was about giving myself some positive momentum which it did this painting did feel looser and i was proud of several ways that my approach to building it up shifted and started to make more sense to me so what i did next was critical i gave myself a pat on the back and i moved on to the next painting i didn't stop to overwork it and in that next painting i was set up for even more success because i would be painting from life not a photo which i knew would be helpful all by itself and that painting was a leap forward in terms of achieving the looseness and paint texture i was after and yes working from life helped but i also believe that time and repetition were critical here which i'll elaborate on in just a moment and finally we get to this painting so this painting was one that i did back in my studio with a photo reference so i took away the support of working from life and i kind of put it back on hard mode a little bit i know i could have painted it super tightly but it was by about this number of paintings after doing the master study that some things were truly starting to feel intuitive and as a result this painting easily captured a lot of the things that i struggled to include in my work even a month ago so because of this i want to share a parable about quality and quantity so this story originally appeared in david bales and ted orwin's book art and fear and in the book they say a ceramics teacher announced on opening day that he was dividing a class into two groups all those on the left side of the studio he said would be graded solely on the quantity of work they produced and all of those on the right solely on its quality his procedure was simple on the final day of class he would bring in his bathroom scales and weigh the work of the quantity group 50 pounds of pots rated in a 40 pounds a b and so on those being graded on the quality however needed to produce only one pot albeit a perfect one to get an a well come grading time a curious fact emerged the works of the highest quality were all produced by the group being graded for quantity it seemed that while the quantity group was busily turning out piles of work and learning from their mistakes in the process the quality group had sat theorizing about perfection and in the end had little more to show for their efforts than grandiose theories and a pile of dead clay and i think this really goes back to what brene was saying about perfectionism by focusing on repetition that quantity group got to learn from their mistakes they didn't become afraid of them because they knew that those paintings would ultimately count toward the number of pots they needed to get a good grade and i think that's what a lot of painters are really missing we're so focused on getting it perfect that we aren't giving ourselves the room to fail every once in a while or fail a lot i think that's really what helps us to figure out what we really need in order to master our craft so as i told this story there's an interesting detail i want to share which is that james clear retells this parable in his book atomic habits but some of the details were different as it turns out the original parable was about a film photography professor at the university of florida and i actually found this out in a blog post by austin cleon which i'll link below in the description so he says that clear had emailed orland in 2016 and found out that the original story was about a film photography class but it had been altered to a pottery class basically for literary license and to avoid talking too much about photography in the book art and fear but regardless of medium this is a powerful example and one that's really backed up by everything we're learning about mastery in terms of the psychological research that's out there it's far more important to create a habit of frequency and consistency and giving yourself room to fail in fact and really encouraging failure and being curious about failure instead of trying to get it perfect so give yourself grace let your work be enough as it is today and if you keep coming back to your practice you won't wish that you had quote perfected it because you'll be blowing that standard out of the water a year from now if you want help on that path i do have limited slots to speak with artists interested in working with me which i will link below in the description along with austin cleon's blog post a link to brene brown's work and links to both art and fear and atomic habits which are both great works to have in your art library i hope this video has helped to give yourself some of that grace and create a habit of consistency to ultimately make the growth that you want i'd love to hear about all of your successes in the comments so i look forward to reading those and until next time happy painting

Channel: Chelsea Lang

Views: 941,022

Keywords: the real reason why you can't paint loose, how to paint loose, loose painting tips, how to loosen up painting, how to paint loosely, painting loosely in oils, how to loosen up your paintings, oil painting, time lapse, art, painting tutorial, art tutorial, art time lapse, alla prima, chelsea lang, painting, oil painting techniques, chelsea lang painter, alla prima oil painting, chelsea lang artist

Id: GAsiyybzu2Q

Length: 17min 5sec (1025 seconds)

Published: Sat Mar 12 2022