Day 13 of my 30 Days of Creativity Challenge.
I Am an Artist.
Up until now, there were times I found it challenging to call myself “an artist.” I felt like that there was so much to live up to when you call yourself that: having talent, producing a “product,” revealing parts of yourself that expose your soul.
Up until recently, I felt as if I was just pretending. Just doing artsy-fartsy, crafting stuff. Not stuff that “real artists” would do. I had some real impostor syndrome going on.
What changed? How did the perception of myself change? It changed when I no longer cared what others thought of what I was creating. It changed when I realized I was creating art, therefore I am an artist. I wasn’t pretending to be someone I wasn’t, I was being exactly who I was. How do you “pretend” to create art? Why does anyone have to understand what you’ve made? Do you really need to explain yourself, your work? Let your work speak for itself. What I create makes ME happy.
There’s a fear artists have. A fear of revealing their true selves, pieces of their soul that they have tried to protect. People can be mean, critical, judgemental. There will always be someone who doesn’t like your work. There will always be someone who is creating and producing “better” pieces than you. I’ve learned to transcend the opinions of others. I realize that what they think and say are not about me, but rather more about their own selves.
It was traumatic for me as a child to find my art in the garbage, deemed junk. It took me a LONG time to heal from that. My art may not hang in the MET or MOMA, but more importantly, it hangs on my walls at the insistence of my husband, it arrives in mailboxes of the people that I love, and I’ve seen them hanging on the walls and on fridge doors at my friends homes.
I’m an artist because I make art. That is all.
The Soulful Artist 