Do you think you have issues with preciousness? Does your sense of preciousness bring you joy or is it a detriment? I’ll talk about ways this sometimes skewed sense of value can get in our way and what to do with it, but also a bit about how to embrace preciousness in an encouraging and meaningful way.
We’ll go over things like:
- Literal preciousness in the materials themselves
- Preciousness in the Scarcity (quantity)of work we create
- Pride or “parental” based preciousness, where we see what we make as our children
- Ego or attention seeking preciousness—where value is based on what feeds our egos the most
- Selective preciousness: where we fall in love with parts of our work to the determent of the whole.
I share some of my personal struggles with this including cautionary stories and how I work through or with those moments preciousness threatens to limit or paralysis me. So come join me for this solo chat on a oft referred to but not often talked through aspect of creating art.
Other Resources mentioned:
Etsy Seller research and marketing service: https://www.alura.io/
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CREDITS:
Cover design by Sage; Illustration by Olga Kostenko
Cover illustration by Applespc
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Transcript
Speak 0:11
Hello, all my very precious creatives out there. Thank you for joining me on the Sage Arts podcast. This is Sage goin solo in the studio today here in the Sometimes Sunny, although not that often lately environs of Southern California. It is literally a jungle out there. All the rain we had the first half of the year has got the plants going crazy. There are vines that usually stay near the creek that have traversed the little hill and are now in our yard. These are not the only things that have been coming up the hill. It’s crazy out there. The other day, while helping my pond cleaner guy, he started talking about one of his clients. They had found a turtle in their pond. And as he’s telling me the story, I’m checking out this rustling going on in the vines at the top of the hill. And I look in there and there’s this, like, dinner plate sized turtle, wild turtle, trying to get through the little border fence into our yard. Now, I’ve never seen this before, so I didn’t know what to do in the pond. I suggest I try to get her back to the creek. She’s probably trying to lay eggs, so I take her back and she comes running back after me. Well, as fast as a turtle can run, which actually was kind of fast, and it turned out that she could turn herself sideways to get in through the bars of our fence. And so she wandered off up the hill again. I don’t know where she is. So that was crazy. And then yesterday I went for a trail run with Amber, and we called it done just about at the midway point because there was a large rattlesnake that decided to just hang out full length in the middle of the path. So, yeah, we have rattlesnakes here, and I’ve always known this, but I haven’t seen one until now myself, so that was great. And we also having coyote issues, there’s just tons of coyotes there jumping fences into people’s yards and snagging small dogs and cats. Just very sad. But apparently there’s just a lot of them out there, which seems a little crazy because the rabbits and the squirrels and the raccoons and everything else seems to be in large numbers everywhere. So I’m not really sure why the coyotes are jumping the fence to come after our dogs, but even our even our local mountain lion population, which was severely declining to literally maybe like a dozen, I think is the count in our area right now. Well, it had a 25% increase last week. Last week, week four anyways. Recently there is a cougar that gave birth to babies, three little girls. And then there’s been a lot of excitement around that. And down the road from us, they are building the largest natural wildlife bridge across one of the biggest southern California freeways, the one, two, one. The state is doing this in order to join two large ranging areas which might maybe alleviate the wildlife pressing into the urban areas. I’m not sure exactly, but I think making some effort to let nature do its thing, giving these animals areas to roam and figure it out themselves. I think this is an improvement in the right direction. I personally really appreciate the efforts to live with and support wildlife rather than trying to pen it in and control it, because that’s only going to backfire on us. Like I think that’s what we’re seeing with the coyotes. So in any case, the wildlife in the wild outside, as is taking up a lot of my attention, it’s just really interesting. I know this doesn’t sound like it has a lot to do with art, but the things we have going on in the world around us is a huge source of inspiration. And the painting and polymer work I’m doing right now is reflective of that for me. So just sharing what’s on my mind, you know? What’s your inspiration right now? What part of your world is fascinating? You or worrying you or otherwise grabbing your attention here in the studio, the art studio that is, which is just outside the podcast studio door, I’m working away on the acrylic and polymer tile pieces, and that’s what actually gave me the idea and motivation for today’s subject matter. I’ve been doing a lot of testing and playing around and I got all these wonderful pieces of natural stone to work on. But each time I pick one up knowing I’m just goofing around, I have this real intense push back to not play with them, but create finished pieces because they’re really cool pieces of stone only. I’m not at the point where I want to make finished work yet, so I have to get past that. What I’m struggling with is most often referred to as preciousness. That sense that the work or the material or other aspects of what I’m doing has a preciousness that I should not ruin or reduce in value by approaching it frivolously, or otherwise seeing it as a barrier to keep progressing in my work. And of course, I don’t see what I’m doing now as frivolous. But part of me sees the material as precious and wants to treat it with a kind of elevated consideration. And this is part of the conversation I want to have with you today. I’d like to talk about what preciousness is in art, both as a positive force and mindset and the ways that it can be detrimental. First, speaking of preciousness, your comments and notes are particularly precious to me. They keep you and I connected and they give me insight into what you like to hear and what the information I’ve posted is doing for you, so I can better choose the subjects and guests. So I’d like to thank all of you that reach out to me, especially this week. A big thank you to Janelle Sparks for again sharing the podcast announcements, the stories on Instagram. I really appreciate that you and my other cheerleaders must have been really busy this past week because I’ve had lots of visits to the websites. All my stats are just spiking, which is really cool. I don’t look at them that often, but I did this week. It was great. And just a big thank you to all of you. Nice stat numbers are wonderful, but honestly, I prefer connecting with you all personally as much as we can. So keep those notes and messages coming. I can’t wait to get those Zoom gathers going next month so we can chat like in virtual person in person. I’m still planning that out. I’ll let you know what’s going on. In the meantime. Thank you, Janelle, and all of my cheerleaders and the many folks that helped support the podcast with the magazine and book purchases over at the 10th Muse Ask.com website. That’s ten spelled out T A.H. Muse MASC Arts, 10th Muse Arts dot com. That’s a place to go if you want to get some polymer centric books or magazines because you need them or as an avenue for supporting and giving back to this project. Also a thank you to Emily over at Allura mostly for your patience with me. Allure is a research and marketing service specifically for Etsy sellers. That’s a lira, a l u r a I. Oh, that’s the website allure. Oh, she did a little interview with me about my Etsy shop, and I just took a little while to get it all back to her. So I want to thank you for the patience that you’ve had. Emily I’ll leave a link in the show notes for those of you who want to read the little interview, it would be of interest mostly to Etsy sellers, as was the primary focus of the feature. But in any case, thank you, Emily, for your patience and kindness. The Allure Service looks to be a real shortcut for those of you who have busy Etsy shops. It definitely can give you more time creating versus marketing because that’s what they do and you create. That’s what you do and know. They didn’t pay me to say that. Just want to say thanks and let you know the interviews are out there. If you’d like to support this podcast or contact me, all the various links are in the show notes. Those are those things that you find at the end of the episode page and your podcast player, or if you’re on a browser on the RSS site there in the description box, you can also go to the sage Ask.com website to find pretty much everything that I’m talking about. As far as links, there are mostly on the homepage. If you go partway down you’ll find the PayPal and buy me a coffee donation buttons if you want to give back or go to the contact page in the navigation list to send me an email. You can also send me messages or comments on social media on Facebook and Instagram under the Sage Arts Podcast. I have been posting little reels, by the way. On contrast, I’m going to be doing this for the design focus for each month, and the design focus this month is contrast. So gone over and follow and get a regular peek at those. The design dips, as I’m calling them, are a great way to passively learn or get a refresher on artistic design. So go check that out. Okay, enough of all that business nonsense. Let’s talk about preciousness. The question for you today to keep in mind as you listen is simply to consider whether you have issues with preciousness. Does your sense of preciousness bring you joy or is it a detriment? We’ll talk about a handful of ways this sense of value can get in your way, but also a bit about how to embrace preciousness in an encouraging and meaningful way. And why don’t we start with that? What is a positive view of preciousness? I think to create from a mess of raw materials something imbued with you, the way you put yourself in the paint or the clay or the paper, the camera, the digital code, the metal, the wood, the stones, the fiber, whatever it is you create with the way you take it from nothing to an entity of its own, it’s really magic. Art is an imprint of your mind in the material, a transference of who you are into the inanimate in a way that can be given to someone else so that they can experience a little bit of you and your world or your aesthetic every time they look at it or use it or just remember it. It’s really mind blowingly amazing. That is a great kind of preciousness. The fact that this is a rare thing that you’ve created that didn’t exist before ever in the world. It’s a miraculous thing. It’s astonishing. It’s just intensely precious. But there is a dark side to this, a contrasting side, if you will, since we’re talking contrast this month. I’ll point out those contrasts. The issue that can arise all too often with this sense of preciousness is that it can create fear, some version of fear, and it can even create creative paralysis. This is actually a huge thing for me, something I’ve battled with on several levels throughout my artistic career. The curious thing about this is that most people I’ve known who deal with it aren’t or weren’t particularly aware of the problems that preciousness causes. If they were aware that they battled with it at all. I think the reason for that is that it’s so very natural to feel that your work is precious because for one, it is, but it’s probably not precious for the reasons you think. Yes, we all know our work has value. Multiple types of value. Actually, it has monetary value. Of course, even if you don’t sell your work, even if it’s not masterful, even if it’s not finished, it still retains some level of monetary value. In other words, someone out there would probably be willing to trade your work whatever condition it is for something of value to them, money or goods or services on some level. But that is not the most important or inherent aspect of the work’s preciousness. Our work always, always, always has more value to it beyond what we can trade or be paid for it. Once we’ve created something, even if we don’t finish it, we forever have the experience of creating it good, bad or otherwise. Brett and I talked a little bit about this, kind of touched on it last week. You don’t always do the creative work you do in order to get a return on your investment kind of thing. You do it for the joy of it. Just like you take a hike for the joy of it, or go to the movies or on a trip or whatever. You do it for the experience. Now, I’ve only met two artists that got into art, as in they started in on it and did so because they thought they could make money at it. It’s kind of a rare thing, right? So why do so many of us assign value to our art, primarily based on its monetary value? Most of us honestly come to this because we love to create. We love to get lost in the material in the process. We live it for the wonder in our discoveries and or we do it for the satisfaction of creating something that didn’t exist before. We dreamed it up. Every time you make something, you gain that experience. Even if it doesn’t work out. Things are learned, enjoyable hours are productively spent, muses are satiated, and we have memories and stories, if not work to share with others afterwards. So yeah, our work is precious and that preciousness adds to our lives. We gain pride, a sense of accomplishment, sometimes an identity. Sometimes we fall in love with the work and we are happier for having that in our lives. But regardless of what it gives you, it adds to the wonder and the beauty and the magic of our world. And I know that sounds a little hokey and a little proof or whatever, but think about it. What would this world be with no art? I think it’d be dull. I think it’d be uninspiring kind of base. Even art is what makes us human. And it’s a part of all of us. Everybody we make art or we surround ourselves with it, or we look to it for entertainment or all of the above. But no matter who you are, your life is better because the creative arts exist in it. Take away art and we’d do nothing but work and eat and procreate and sleep. Creativity takes our lives beyond that, along with a few other things. But I’m partial to the effect that art has in our world. So I’ll stick with that. That’s how precious your art is. And don’t forget that as we go into the issues that we can have due to preciousness, it’s important to recognize the intrinsic value of what we do, but also to recognize when it personally causes problems in creating your work or steers you from your potential or your joy. So let’s talk about the types of preciousness that can be problematic. And there are several versions of preciousness to consider. Mind you, these are my categories. You’ll see other discussions out there with other breakdowns for this, or most of the time it’s just one large grouping of this is preciousness. And this is a problem kind of thing. But I think this break down explains it pretty well. And keep in mind, these aren’t all bad things. Mostly it’s how you work with these feelings or realities that make them a joy or a hindrance in your work. Here are my kind of five breakdowns for it. First of all, there’s literal preciousness in the materials themselves. Sometimes the material is actually precious, like it’s gold or rare wood or gems or high end painter papers or whatnot. Sometimes it’s precious due to our budget constraints. There’s also preciousness in the scarcity of work because how much we can make is limited, especially if you create slowly or irregularly. Then there’s also pride or parental based preciousness where we see what we make is kind of like our children. And then there’s ego or attention seeking preciousness where value is based on what feeds our egos the most. And lastly, selective preciousness. We’ll talk about where we fall in love of parts of our work. Sometimes to the detriment of the whole piece. Okay, let’s look deeper at each of these. First of all, literal preciousness. We’re talking about the cost of materials relative to one’s income. If you don’t have a lot of money, the money spent on materials, whether considered precious or costly, by most or not, it only matters if it’s costly to you. This perception or view of the material can make you conservative in the use of your materials because you worry about how much you’ve spent on it. Right. This can hold you back from exploring and allowing yourself to make mistakes to the point that it can be paralyzing. One of my most epitomizing experiences stories or whatnot with this was when I was given a small package of silver art clay, and I was so excited I was going to make a silver ring out of it, and I bought all the additional tools, materials and I educated myself and I read all these books, I looked all these tutorials, and you know what that was like ten years ago, and it is all still sitting there untouched. I just cannot decide what to make because I couldn’t think of anything that was perfect enough to be worth using up that $50 worth of silver clay, or at least something that I knew I could do that was worth it. Which is ridiculous because now it’s just a lump sitting there not doing anything, not being anything. And that’s the danger of seeing your materials as precious. There’s a good possible 80. You may not do anything with them because you’re afraid of ruining something already seen as valuable before it’s even made into anything really valuable. So that lump of silver actually has no value beyond what I could trade it in, as I think it’s like 50 grams of silver or something. But how much more would it have been worth if I made something beautiful out of it? What if I messed it up? Well, hey, it’s still be worth the same as it is sitting in that package right now. But because, to be honest, I was monetarily struggling at the time. The publishing company and the magazine was pretty young and. And it put all my money into it. So a tiny bit of material worth $50 was paralyzing, only precious to me and my minuscule art budget. And now I have a dried up little piece of silver art clay that I can’t do anything with. It’s actually kind of reduced its worth, right? And it’s just stupid. So just keep that cautionary tale in mind that don’t be so paralyzed. You don’t actually do anything with the materials that you have. Also, your perception of material preciousness can make you create more for the market that you’re trying to sell to than for yourself. When you feel you need to recoup what you spent on materials in order to make it feasible to do or to validate your materials as a priority in your budget. Right? This may actually not be a problem for you if you’re more of a crafter than an artist, and you just want to cover the costs of creating that, that’s fine and that’s great and it’s a valid way to keep doing what you love. But if you want to explore and develop your own artistry, work towards a market that wants your work, or if you’re stuck with an imperfect market for now, make time for your own expressive work as well. That’ll make you happier in the long run and it’ll inform your market focus, work, keeping it evolving and exciting for you and your customers. Material preciousness can also add to the fear surrounding potential failure, which we’ve talked about a number of times on this podcast. By seeing our work that doesn’t result in completed or saleable pieces as wasted, which adds financial stress as well. The thing is, the cost of exploration, the cost of being an artist is something that needs to be worked into. Your budget. You will, as an artist, not complete everything that you do, and not all the finished work will be successful or will sell. In my personal experience, I was able to make about 70 to 80% of the work that I did saleable not that all of it sold, but I think I was pretty fortunate in that by the end of the year, I usually sold about 90% of what I’ve made because I did clearance sales or whatnot. So look at your averages and come up with a waste budget. Like in my scenario, I could assume 30% waste. And if you are comfortable with a budget like that where like every $10 materials includes $3 in product that won’t become art, then you can more comfortably create with curiosity and take risks knowing you’re okay financially because you’ve budgeted it already. Now, this doesn’t necessarily get you over the hump of trying to avoid wasting material. If you’re raised to never waste anything or you have environmental concerns about wasting precious resources. But if that’s an issue for you, most materials, at least that I have experience with, have really interesting ways to use what is often thought of as wasted material. Polymer clay, for instance, is famous for that. There’s literally hundreds of ways to reuse polymer cured and cured. You can also reuse canvases and boards for painting. You can even scrape acrylic off pallets and make little semi translucent tiles for mosaics or mixed media pieces and things like that. So educate yourself on ways that you can reduce or reuse your used materials. Just Google your material plus keywords like recycle or upcycle or salvage and hopefully finding those options will make you more comfortable playing with your material, knowing that you have ways of reusing or recycling any of the waste items.
That’s the material preciousness part. Let’s get on to the next really big one, which is scarcity, because we can only make so many pieces, especially large or labor intensive ones. We get a bit more skittish around that type of work. Or if you don’t make many pieces, every piece you do can feel monumental. You need to get away from that if at all possible. We often hear that we should go for quality versus quantity, and to a certain extent that’s true. But if it gets to the point where each individual piece is so precious that you have a hard time finishing it because you fear finding out that you failed when you’re done or whatnot, or you spend an excess of amount of time trying to make it perfect instead of exploring your other creative ideas. It’s time to go for quantity, at least for a little while. If you have a little bit of that budget issue, we just talked about, make small versions so you can get more done. It also should help with the amount of time that you spend, as well as the materials that you use. Put deadlines and limits on your work, and make things that are close enough to finish, to be shown or sold and actually push yourself to show or sell them. Do whatever you can to move projects through your studio. Once you do and you see the responses that you get, the sales that you get that you can go back and look at something that you thought was imperfect and not really see the imperfections later on because you haven’t been close to it for a while. I think that’ll prove to you that your level of perfection due to preciousness is holding you back and is not serving your creative growth. And I think once you see that, it’s going to really free you up. Okay. Now on to what I like to call pride or parental based preciousness. This occurs when you see each of your pieces as kind of like your babies or because you see artwork as its own entity, something that shouldn’t be messed with after its initial birthing or whatever. I know some people never look back at their work, never self-critique, never try to change or fix or edit or whatever you want to call it, because they feel like the initial rush of creativity is like sacrosanct. Like when you have a child, you don’t look at them and say what needs to be fixed, right? But that’s because it’s a child. And then the child has a growing consciousness separate from you. Your artwork is not separate from you, not during the process, not until it’s given away or sold. And just as you would try to improve yourself where and however you can hopefully ideally, you should also be able to go back into your work and improve or fix or edit to make it better, to make it the best it can be. Do not assign preciousness to the initial form to its initial first draft. Art is created. It’s not really birth, so don’t see your first attempt as a precious child. See it as a work in progress that it really is. And then let’s talk about ego or attention seeking preciousness as now there are other and related terms for this, particularly social media induced dopamine addiction. But I thought I’d group how this affects us as artists under preciousness because it’s related and it has made the same effects on us these days. We too often see the world assign value and judge us and our work by that finicky role of the social media dice the algorithms, the pieces that we post that garner the most accolades become a focus. For many of us, this does two detrimental things. One, we may end up planning and measuring our future work to some extent by the questionable success of the pieces we got the most attention for. Instead of creating the work that matters to us, to our muse, to our artistic self, instead of making what we want to make or need to make, we’re making what we think will get the most likes and that’s a travesty. At least I think so. Maybe you don’t think so, but can you tell yourself right now that the masses out on social media have really great artistic taste, that they, for the most part, are the best judges of what great art is and what great art is for you. If you believe that, then you can just ignore everything I just said and what I’m about to say. But if you realize that the masses out there aren’t the ones you probably want to judge your work, that you and your potential customers and maybe friends, family and other artists you admire are the ones that count. And maybe you can let go of that attention seeking aspect that assigns preciousness to certain popular pieces and just make what your muse is curious about, or at the very least, that your real life customers want. Now, I know many of us get on social media to increase our market. That is the great hope we all have, right? But when even the most popular people are transforming something like 2% of the attention that they’re getting into actual sales, an average good conversion rate is something like 2 to 5%. Realize that you are letting that other 95 to 98% of the audience that’s commenting and liking your work or maybe more if you consider all the people that pass you by which you don’t know about, but you feel when you don’t get all those likes that you hope for, so you know you’re being passed by when you let these others determine what you do or you see what you think of as popular posts and try to recreate that popularity for yourself when you don’t know why that piece actually went viral. I mean, it could have gone viral because of paid marketing or a huge following that they gained over like a decade or just good timing or just great photo editing or whatnot. When you do that, you’re making changes based on things that have little or nothing to do with you or your art. So don’t assign preciousness, don’t assign value to certain pieces over others based on the feedback you get on social media. It’s just not going to be accurate. Yes, it’s wonderful to put your stuff up there and get the likes and get the accolades and get the comments and feed the ego a little. Nothing wrong with that. Go ahead and bask in that positivity, but make your own independ ENT decisions about what you’re creating based on your unique voice. Just let your curiosity lead you, not what you think works on social media. And the other reason why having our thoughts focused on social media is detrimental is because we can end up spending so much time and mental energy posting and promoting and checking in on posted work that we are not working, or more importantly, our free time. Our free mental time is not being given over to to develop new artistic ideas, to let our curiosity more things over and access our authentic selves and not just ponder the trends on social media. See the necessity of doing Nothing Episode as Episode 20. If you don’t know why this time is important for you, our minds aren’t as open to the inspiration of the world around us like the wildlife I was talking about earlier. When we’re busy thinking about the online world or social media at least. And that’s not to say that social media is all bad. Like I said, it’s nice to get those little ego strokes. There’s nothing wrong with that. It keeps us going. In many ways, it’s motivating and there are useful posts on those platforms, including skillfully made works of art and inspiring stories and all that kind of thing. But you need to be able to get all that out of your head when you work and remember that the sense of value, that outside validation is not the source of your ideas or your unique voice. Last point on this. Let’s talk about selective preciousness. This is when you’re falling in love with certain parts of your art. And we all have this. We all have little parts of our work that we just like, we just adore. It might be a particularly well rendered face or an amazing combination of colors or a dramatic but accidental texture. We love these parts so much that we will change other things in the work to make them fit even when they don’t. Or we don’t take them out even when they don’t fit. You need to do what’s best for the whole piece, so don’t apply preciousness to just parts of your work. It blinds you to the value and worthiness of the other parts and really the end result of the whole piece. If there are parts you love, but you know you’ve got to get rid of it or change it or whatever, maybe you can save it in some way, like take a close up photo of it, or maybe even you can cut it out or carved out or start the piece over again and leave the unfinished piece with your little beauty in there still intact so you can admire it. Whenever. This is a well known aspect in writing. And we have a song called Kill Your Darlings because there is this potential danger to work. The rest of the text around these sentences that we love, these descriptive lines or these great dialogue lines that we just cover so good, but they’re great on their own. So a lot of people like cut them out and put them into like a separate document. They keep all their darlings that are killing their dialogue and they just kind of like they kind of trap them somewhere else. But if you don’t do that, it keeps you from making a better piece and something that makes sense. I really think it does apply to every form of creative art. You just really have to be willing to sacrifice any part of your initial draft of your work as needed. Just assign preciousness to the well finished piece and not just parts of it. Now, you might have noticed that all these types of preciousness include the danger of one specific thing that they kept kind of harping on not progressing, not moving on to more creative work. I feel like this is true of preciousness and all types of things, like if you get a new pair of shoes and you love them so much, you’re afraid to wear them and get them dirty and scuffed, you have the object, but then you don’t have the experience The object has to offer. So you’ve gotten to the point of acquisition, but not beyond that, right? There’s so much more you could get out of that pair of shoes. You could go out on the town, have fun. You can get that boost of confidence when you’re wearing something you think looks really great. You can get compliments on them, all that kind of stuff, right? I’m not saying you have to take your art out there and get it dirty and scuffed. It’s not what I’m saying. If anything, I’m saying you need to get out there and get dirty and scuffed because that means you would have experiences then, and you need to have the experiences more than you need the object. Some of you might want to argue with me about that. Maybe there’s a reason for some of you to hold the object of art in higher regard than anything else. It can do or represent for you. If so, please write me about that, by the way, because I couldn’t think of a good reason. But for some reason I’m thinking there might be. And I’d like to see the other side of it. If it’s out there. I know Brett has learned that nothing he makes is particularly precious to the type of work he does. And if this is the first time you listen to the podcast. Brett is my husband and he works in animation in the big studios in Burbank out here in Southern California. And I think losing a certain level of preciousness with his work is really a gift. He works in an industry where his creative efforts do not reach their final stage, where he can see the outcome for months, if not a year or two after he’s done working with it. By the time the cartoons he works on are televised, he’s onto something else. There’s some great work actually, that he’s done, and he’s never even seen it because by the time it came out, it just wasn’t important to him anymore. He also sketches all the time and he sketches so much. So it’s this whole quantity thing, right? Honestly, sketches every day, multiple pages a day. So there’s no scarcity issue there. There’s no rarity in what he’s made. Some of the pieces are really, really good and are more rare than others. That always happens, right? But I really admire that. He just keeps drawing every page, page after page. It’s tons of books. He has a closet full of sketchbooks that he’s done because that’s how much he’s done, and that really helps him set aside any hesitation and drawing whatever it is that he wants to draw for all of this lack of preciousness and these other areas, he did at one point get really wrapped up in the responses he would get on Instagram when he would post his work, but he toggled off the listing of how many likes his images get so he doesn’t automatically see that when he goes in. And I think that’s really not a bad idea. If you get a bit obsessed with those numbers, you see problems of preciousness. On some level, it’s even the most hardened artistic veterans. As for me, every day I sit down to paint or sculpt, I have to give myself explicit permission to use whatever I want as much as I want. And still it’s hard because those precious feelings I have with my material is partly for the sake of the environment, not just for our budget here, but if you are going to create, you really don’t want to do it halfway. I don’t know if I will ever be able to just go wild with my materials because I was raised not to be wasteful and I’ve never been wealthy. So it’s it’s a hard thing to battle, but being aware of it and being logical rather than emotional helps free me up to do the work I want to do. When preciousness kind of rears the ugly side of its head, right? So next time you find yourself hesitating or stopping or skimping, just go ahead and kill your darlings. You know, that might be mentally killing off your ideas of preciousness, or they may literally be destroying the artistic object that you find precious. And that’s that’s something you should do. If you’ve never made something knowing you’re going to destroy it at the end, go ahead and try it. It’s amazingly freeing. You stop worrying about perfection. When that happens, your child’s self just comes out and just plays with the material. There is no preciousness because there is no permanency of the object that you’re creating. And that’s kind of a big lesson there. There isn’t a lot of permanency in art. Sure, our work could last tens or hundreds or maybe thousands of years, depending on the material and the quality and how it’s cared for, of course. But in our own lives, most of our work disappears. At some point it goes to another home. It’s given to a family or friends. It gets buried in boxes under newer work or gets stashed in the attic. A small percentage of our work is displayed in our homes or studios or other places where we get to go and visit it. But the vast majority of our work leaves our lives. There’s no permanency there. So why is there such a natural insistence on assigning preciousness primarily to the objects that we create? What we should be assigning preciousness to is the experience of creating the object in the first place. And again, our art is precious, but mostly in that it signifies a journey for us the learning, a growth, a progression of our creative selves. Right? So make the work, love it, revere it like you do the best at the end of a hike, breathe it in and then turn around and go to the next part of your road so you gain more of that kind of preciousness. Now, if you’ve struggled with preciousness or you just realizing now the struggle that you’ve had with preciousness, and that’s what it is, it’s something that you’ve had in the past, I’d love to hear your stories. I don’t have to share them with everybody. By the way, I know a lot of you are shy and that’s okay, but it really helps me to help you. If I can get your point of view, just tell me if you don’t want me to share something that you send to me, but you can write me through the contact page at the Sage art website or on social media, You can send me a message there on Facebook or Instagram on the Sage Arts podcast pages. Follow me there and let’s get a conversation going and remember to hit that follow button, by the way, on your podcast player as well. If you’re listening to me on Apple or Spotify or Google or whatnot, you can get all of these links that I keep bringing up as well as the donation buttons. If you want to give back because you found this valuable, if not precious, and you can find those in the show notes and on the sage Cars.com website, if you’re listening to this through the RSS website link that I bandy about all the time, the links are in the description box there. And if you want to keep up to date on my activities on the Zoom chats coming in July and get any extra material offered to go with various episodes, which happens like once a month or so, click that news and notice this button on the home page of the Sage Arts website to get the latest Sunday morning email. I don’t use that email list for anything else, literally. I promise. I promise. Promise. I’d also like to know what you think of the podcast. And the best place right now, besides writing me directly is to give me a review on your podcast player reviews and follows on the show. Help move the podcast up the search list, or so I’m told. So let’s get more people in on this conversation, shall we? In the meantime, why don’t you go to your studio and start thinking about what is precious to you and why and whether it is a joy or a hindrance. There’s nothing wrong with falling in love with your work. Just don’t let your darlings hold you back, okay? So until next time, keep progressing in your work. Stay curious. Feed that muse of yours. Be true to your brand of weirdness and I’ll catch you here for the next episode of the Sage Arts Podcast.
