How do you keep the motivation and inspiration to keep making Beastlies?? I can only make, like, three things on my own before I end up trashing the idea completely!
Oh hello, Anon. I know you probably think you’ve asked a light, relatively straight-forward question, but in actuality, you’ve stumbled dangerously close to the territory of Things I Think A Lot About, so we’re going to get ALL UP IN THIS NOW. BUCKLE UP.
You didn’t give me any details about where you are in your life/career or what it is you do, but it sounds like POSSIBLY you’re tinkering with the idea of turning your creative interests into more than just an occasional hobby. Maybe? I’m for sure reading a lot into a couple words, but that’s where the interesting stuff lives, so we’ll go over there. Let’s pretend my assumptions are correct and say that you’ve got an artistic drive and you want to DO something with it, something more than sketching for fun at the end of the work day. But you don’t really know what you want to do.
You, I don’t know, let’s say you took at a stab at painting portraits of owls, because owls are neat. But after a few portraits, you were totally bored and owls lost their appeal. You ditch the owl-painting business. That is not a failure. That is a success. If paintings of owls are not the thing that you’re totally obsessed with, then it’s not what you were going to want to chain yourself to. Your goal is to find yourself, creatively, and you’re probably not just going to decide on it right off the bat. You’re carving a giant marble sculpture of yourself as an artist, and you’ve got to knock a lot of chunks of rock off to get to the thing inside. Owls was a chunk. Congrats: it’s gone. Maybe you even made a few bucks on some owl paintings in the process, or even better, you improved your painting skills. These steps are totally necessary, even if they’re frustrating.
Now, if you’re trying to make this your career, then it’s more complicated. So let me repeat a thing that’s an old idea, something a lot of people have said a lot of different ways… Andy J Miller is an artist who does a podcast that I recall talking about this, and he sums it up as “The right path is the center point balance of your skills vs passion, market demand vs internal calling.” I’ve also seen it as a venn diagram, like this:
(Don’t be too intimidated by the idea of “what the world needs.” If you’re an artist, that’s an overwhelming requirement, so think of it more like “what connects with people.”)
The trick is the balance that’s there in the middle. And when you’re starting out, sometimes you have to veer too far into the land of “what you can be paid for,” and out of the “what you love doing” area, but have faith in yourself enough to not get stuck there forever. Keep angling toward work that is unique to you, work that really matters to you, and force yourself to have the confidence to believe that people will connect to it when it gets there.
If they’re not connecting to it yet, you may not be there yet. People respond best to things that are true. When you’re doing the work that’s somehow true, it is more likely to resonate with others. Look, I know that sounds so pretentious, but it’s not as fancy as all that. I mean, look at me: I’m either making pop-eyed little goobers or weird lizardy-dog-lemur-manatee things. I’m not writing Moby Dick over here, but these things I’m making are insanely important to me and weirdly true to my soul in ways I can’t really explain. Will I be making the same work in 10 years? No. Maybe it’ll still be Beastlies, maybe it won’t. But even if it is, it won’t be the same. Maybe they’ll be one more owl-shaped chunk of marble I knocked off, or maybe they’ll just keep evolving until they’re very, very close to the middle of that chunk of marble (sorry, lost the metaphor there). Anyway, it’s a process that doesn’t end for as long as you keep creating. And that is what I believe strongly enough to write a whole big thing about it.
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