How do you handle the fear that comes with trying something new, unfamiliar, or risky? In this episode, I share my own present fears about a new direction with my own art, how to properly acknowledge fear for what it is for and to you, and ways to work through it when it is stopping you from something you really want to do.
This is a short one that might need to be revisited but it will get started on considering not only how you handle your own fear but how to support others as they face their own roadblocks in art and life.
–
CONTACT SAGE
Email Sage via the contact form or send a voice mail (use the red button, bottom right) on the show website: http://thesagearts.com/contact/
And join Sage on social media:
Instagram https://www.instagram.com/thesageartspodcast/
Facebook https://www.facebook.com/TheSageArtsPodcast
–
GET WEEKLY PODCAST NOTICES & BONUS MATERIAL:
–
SUPPORT THIS PODCAST
· Buy a STICKER! (Get 2 per order as of this release.)
· Buy polymer art books and magazines
–
CREDITS:
Cover design and episode photo by Sage; Illustration by Olga Kostenko
Music by Playsound
For Transcript click on the episode here: https://rss.com/podcasts/thesagearts/
–
TRANSCRIPT:
Transcription (AI transcribed, unedited. Please excuse the copious errors.)
“And if you get to a point where you’re super scared and you just freeze up and you stop, that’s fine. Acknowledge your emotion, acknowledge what you’re feeling, Acknowledge that this is going to be hard, but if you really want to do it, you’ll keep at it. and if you don’t keep at it, maybe it’s not what you want to do …”
Hello, all my wonderful, brave creatives out there. thank you for joining me for the Sage Arts podcast. This is Sage doing another solo one for you here. Today’s going to be done a little differently. Usually I have written up some notes. I have at least bullet points if I haven’t like written a word for word. But today I am going to totally wing this one because I’m trying to get out of town for a check on my family and my friends out in Colorado
I also want to try just talking to you like as if we were sitting at a cafe table across from each other discussing something that can be really personal and really hard to talk about. And that subject is the fear that we have around things that we want to do but maybe can’t because there’s something in us that says this is scary or this is too hard one of the reasons I want to talk about is because I personally am going through this right now.
but before we get into that, just shout out to everybody who stops and says hi Thank you for dropping by on Instagram and Facebook at this age or its podcast pages, or writing me via the Sage Ask.com or sending me a few dollars to help support this because you value what I do. That’s also at the Sage Ask.com. About halfway down the home page, there’s buttons for Buy Me a Copy and PayPal.
So anyways, let’s talk about fear. So fear is a good thing. Actually. We need it. We need to know when something is dangerous and we need something in us to tell us to not approach or do or use or whatever this dangerous thing is. So fear has its place in our lives. It’s not a bad thing, but we oftentimes associate things that aren’t actually bad for us or dangerous for us with things that have happened to us in the past or things that we’ve been told or things that we’ve seen. And it stops us from moving forward, doing things that we like or would be really good for us.
So in artwork, this often happens because we risk failure when we sit down to do work every single time you sit down, you risk failing at what you’re doing. And always wish I was another word for that. You risk not accomplishing what you set out to do is a phrase maybe, maybe not a word. But in any case, you always risk something when you create and I think that’s a beautiful thing, and I think it’s something we should be doing every single time.
Risk means that you’re trying. Risk means that you’re challenging yourself, but risk is scary. And for a lot of people, it can stop them in their tracks, It can keep them from creating, it can keep them from trying the types of things that they may dream about, that they feel like they would just be in heaven if they could accomplish. But because it’s scary, because there is fear involved, we just don’t do it.
So this is something I’m actually dealing with right now, which is weird for me because I’m very much a go getter. I’m very much a jump in with both feet and see what happens. But sometimes things are really close to my heart. So I painted a lot in art school and I was always very frustrated by especially color mixing and not understanding why everything looks so flat. And our teachers… and I was comparing this with Bret the other day you know, because he and I went to the same art school and the painting teachers never taught us much. They taught us a lot of design stuff and we have separate design classes in college.
So I’m not sure why that was, but they didn’t really teach us about how to use the material, like how the material performs, like we did watercolor, that got kind of technical, but when it came to acrylics or oils, they basically told us how to work with it safely and then said, Paint this still life or paint a landscape or paint self-portrait or whatnot. And we didn’t get a lot of instruction.
So I always felt like my painting wasn’t doing what I want it to do, wasn’t going anywhere. But I always loved it. And because I wasn’t accomplishing what I wanted to accomplish, I kind of gave it up. And yet every time I look at painting supplies in an art store, in a catalog or online, it always got me excited. Always, always, always. And yet I didn’t go back and do it. But now recently, I’ve been working on some mosaic designs. I want to do stonework mosaics, and I started getting ideas about painting the stone, and then I started getting ideas about painting on stone as a canvas. And I just got so super excited and I decided to just dive in.
So I looked at all my old painting supplies and actually some of them still were good. It was amazing. I mean, some of them were like 15 years old, then I started working on it, but I have found that I have this heightened anxiety around doing this work because I have these ideas of things that I want to do. I don’t know how I’ll get there.
And I guess I learned in art school that I’m not going to accomplish what I want with painting, and maybe that’s still sitting there, but the fact is, is I can tell myself, I know I’ve tried all sorts of things. I think these days I think about some of the stuff I did, like I used to install satellite TV. like dishes that are on the houses in the apartments, I just install that as I go around and crawl in, you know, attics and crawl spaces and on roofs. And I drill holes in people’s walls and, you know, all kinds of crazy things that now I think about it. It’s actually kind of scary that I was doing that to people’s houses and that’s what I got paid for. And yet at the time was just like, Wow, I’m just going to go do this. That’s okay. This is good, flexible work. I can do this and then go home and write or do my artwork or whatever I was doing at the time. And I didn’t question that I could do it. I knew how to do it and I just did it.
But now I think, Oh that’s kind of scary. And I don’t know what I’ve learned since then. That was six years ago or more that I did that. But now I’m painting and it’s freaking me out doing this acrylic painting. I don’t know why. It’s not like I don’t know design. It’s not like I don’t know how to mix colors and I do know how to mix colors so much better than I did when I was in college.
And if you have had the same issue with mixing colors and paint and being frustrated or mixing it in polymer or pastels or any other medium, look into the seam. Why approach to mixing color where your primaries are cyan, magenta and yellow? And I think I’m actually going to do a whole podcast on it because the history of it is super, super interesting. That’s great. Stories involved in the evolution of our color wheels from the traditional color , which was red, blue and yellow, right to today’s what’s called the modern color mixing palette, which is the cyan, magenta and yellow. so I’ll probably do a whole set on that. But in any case, now that I know that I can mix colors even better than I did college,
So I know these things, my handle on composition and balance and values and all that stuff is so much better, especially since I talk and teach about it all the time. It’s so ingrained. So what do I have to fear? Well, I’ve spent the last What is it now? geez, almost 20 years doing polymer and I know the material so well and I’ve talked about it and I taught it. I did the magazines and the books on it, and now I’m looking at material that I don’t know. Like if I wanted to make something in polymer, have no question that I can do it. I know what the material’s going to do. I know how I need to manipulate it to behave the way I want it to. And I don’t with paint.
So I’m scared and I can tell myself, you know, all this stuff, you are good, you are going to be fine. You just sit down and paint and it freaks me out So I’m telling myself all the little things I would tell anybody that was coaching you take it one small step at a time. So I painted a color wheel with the paint so I could get used to how the paints operate. I can get used to their pigment depth and their tint and all of the aspects that paint has they have an awful lot of characteristics I started doing little texture studies and am painting on these two by two inch stone tiles. I can get used to the stone thing so starting small and that’s what you do when you’re scared. You start small, right? And it’s still freaking me out.
on top of that. I have several friends who are going through a lot of stuff and they’re really down on themselves or they’re really depressed. And I have one friend who has days where she just doesn’t get up. You know, she manages maybe to get out of bed and get to a chair and she just doesn’t do anything, even though she has opportunities to do all kinds of wonderful things. She’s having a really hard time. She’s depressed and she’s had a lot of things happen to her recently. So it’s understandable. But the advice she’s primarily getting is just get yourself up and get yourself out the door and do things Just do something. Just just, just
the thing is, is fear is not always logical. And you can’t just do something. You can’t just act a certain way in order to get past it because the fear is still there. It’s like a brick wall. It’s like just walk through it. You can’t walk through it right now. Sometimes that does work for some people, you know, just do. It is a mantra that they can take to whatever they’re trying to do, But like when someone’s depressed, like my friend is, you can’t just say, just do it. Things can be really, really difficult. And everybody’s story is different. Everybody’s level of difficulty is different.
So if you are having trouble doing what you want to do because of fear and people are telling you, just do it, just jump in and just go for it. I am with you. I empathize that it’s not easy to just do. It doesn’t mean that you can’t. But I just want to say you’re heard. You’re understood. It’s not easy at all. But It’s not impossible. I never believe that anything’s impossible, just depends on how much you’re willing to wait for it. how deep that is in you that you’ve got to work out.
Now, for some of us, the only thing that’s going to work is like therapy, right? if you’re not big on therapist, you don’t have the money or what not, then that becomes difficulty too. But maybe friends or family, the people who will listen and not just tell you, just do it, you know, because from our point of view, it seems like, yeah, you know, we’re in a good place. We could just see ourselves doing whatever it is that you want to do. Like, let’s say you want to paint and you’re scared and people say, Well, just just do it. But you need someone to say, I hear you. And I understand that this is a difficult thing for you to accomplish right now. So what small thing do you think you could do?
So for me, it’s doing the color wheels in doing the texture studies, and I’m just going to keep at it, you know, And hopefully at some point I will see some accomplishments that will show me that I can do this. So if you have something that you’re fearing, that you’re really having a difficult time getting through or approaching take small steps, that’s always key. So what tiny, tiny, tiny thing can you do right now to get past it? So like my friend who’s really depressed, I told her just, you know, put on some music or put on a movie that has a really positive mood to it, like a, you know, comedy show, comedy movie or really beautiful, upbeat music. And it doesn’t take a whole lot to do that. And it’s a very passive thing that you’re doing at that point.
So like for me initially on this painting stuff, I started looking at YouTube videos. That was my first small thing when I was like, Oh, I don’t know if I should do this. And I saw what people were doing and some of that scared me more. I guess there they’re really good. And then some of it was like, Oh yeah, I could do that. I could totally do that. And I know if I keep working at it, I’ll be able to manage it. And so if you do those small things, it’s going to shift your position a little bit and hopefully in a positive way and then find the next small thing. So I started with YouTube videos and then I did a color wheel and then I did texture studies.
If you can take little small things like that know that just chipping away at it will eventually get you where you want to go, And if you get to a point where you’re super scared and you just freeze up and you stop, that’s fine. Acknowledge your emotion, acknowledge what you’re feeling, Acknowledge that this is going to be hard, but if you really want to do it, you’ll keep at it. and if you don’t keep at it, maybe it’s not what you want to do now for something you have to do. That’s a whole other thing.
And talk to somebody and get some help about, you know, taking care of your health or working on your relationships, all those things that make our life, you know, positive and fulfilling and healthy. But if it comes down to artwork and there’s something you want to try and you’re scared, just try little things.
Let’s say you want to try mosaics and that could be a big investment just cut up little colored pieces of paper and do mosaic designs with that. Or if you’re working with acrylic paint or polymer, acrylic and polymer, you can both lay out and let cure and then cut those up into little squares and you actually do great mosaics from those little things, and just play around with it. And if you’re falling in love with the process, then, you know, this is something you should probably chase, right? But mostly for this particular episode, I just wanted to acknowledge that the fear is real and it’s totally normal. there’s nothing wrong with you It just means that your system is trying to protect you. So take those small steps and then when you can see that it is something that you do want to put the effort into, think in terms of growth, like a pearl, like you just put layers on so you start small and then don’t think in a line like I have to do this and then that and then that and then that. Think of adding things on.
So you start small and you are doing a little small thing that you accomplished and then add something else to your repertoire. Add another skill, add another approach, another medium, another technique, and get that down and Go to something else and add that to your toolbox until you have layered on all these techniques and skills. And at some point you’re going to realize you’re a girl. You are doing this, you have everything you need to do, the things that you want to do, and then you can go and take those risks, which are also scary to do the bigger things that you initially were hoping you would be able to get to.
remember, all of these things that we do in artwork, it’s not about getting to a particular spot. It’s not about jumping on a plane and getting there. It is a journey. It’s more of a car ride or a walk through the woods and you’re going to discover all these things along the way and those things that you discover about yourself, about your skill set, about what you want to do and don’t want to do, are all things that add to your knowledge base that let you make the right decisions about what you need to do for yourself.
So this is going to be super short and I hope this is helpful. It helps me to talk about it. So thank you for being my, surrogate therapy people. It’s our therapy group. Yeah. So just remember, the fear is real, and especially if you have somebody around you that’s having a hard time. Remember, their experience is extremely different from your experience. And if they say they’re having a hard time, if they say they can’t do it, listen to that. Let them talk it out.
And if you want to give them any advice, just offer things like starting small or whatever seems appropriate. Just don’t tell them that their emotion is wrong, their outlook is wrong, that what they’re feeling is not true, not real, not valid, because it is is your emotions are always, always valid. It’s what you do with them that matters. Right?
So with that said, I am going to go run off and head over to Colorado, which is not scary and see some friends and enjoy the outdoors and just feed my muse, just fill up that well and I’m bringing a sketchbook so I can sketch out ideas for acrylic paintings and hopefully that will help me as well. In terms of approaching it. So that’s what I am off to do.
If you’ve got a fear that you need to face, what are you going to do? What are you going to try to give yourself to possibly get past that fear or at least find out if it’s important enough for you to get past.
So in the meantime, while I’m off doing that, you’re off doing your thing. You feed your muse and be true to your weirdness. And I’ll see you next time on the Sage Arts podcast.
