A creative who has fairly high standards for her craft may not look at perfectionism as a “bad” thing. She might just think of it as “of course I want my work to be perfect”. There’s that feeling of it coming really close to how one envisions it but uncomfortably not quite near achieving the imagined goal…
However, there’s a line between always striving to improve one’s skills and performance (how it can be better next time) and beating one’s self up for the perceived flaws, the pain of comparisons to others’ work, never being happy with a finished result, going back over work again and again. Like a ruminant, always chewing, rechewing it. Never allowing it to be finished or to be good right now.
My own experience as an illustrator — one who is required to turn in work on a deadline— means that I’ve never had the luxury of immersing myself in work indefinitely. I’ve had to call it “finished” when the time’s up. This cured me of any perfectionistic tendencies I might’ve had in my freelance work.
That said, I’ve occasionally fallen prey to perfectionistic thinking in my commissioned or fine art work, the apparent lack of a deadline sometimes prompting a delay in starting the work or dragging me foots while I get my head on straight.
What’s evident to me now is that perfectionism is rooted in fear.
Fear of not being good enough. Fear of rejection. Fear of failure. Fear of criticism.
If I don’t start or finish it, I won’t have to face possible failure or criticism. So I procrastinate. I keep changing it. I keep “perfecting” it.
But the world and the client wants to see the work. They want it, warts and all. So I’ve got to put it out there. The world doesn’t see its imperfections.
I read somewhere that Leonardo daVinci worked back and forth on his painting, the Mona Lisa, “perfecting” it for 40 years.
In the last several years since I’ve been doing pottery, I’ve had setbacks where things have not gone right. The kiln gods scoffed at my tendencies for perfectionism in the pottery studio. Stuff has exploded in the kiln for no apparent reason. Glazes have run and or blistered on perfect ware for no apparent reason. Seemingly well-engineered sculptures have fallen and slumped to my surprise and dismay.
When failure happens, it can be tempting to not try it again.
After the large tile (and others with the same clay body) in the photo above was destroyed in the kiln, I was shocked and dismayed. So disappointed was I that I allowed myself to get sidetracked with starting a project in paper mache. It’s a material I’ve been wanting to explore and it seemed as good a time as any. Except that I started it during a very rainy and humid 3-week period over the summer and the sculpture couldn’t dry quickly enough. I had no idea it would get moldy. Compounded failure.
But, I’ve let it go. Heartbreak is only temporary pain as I scoop the shattered bits of tiles into the dustpan or repair kiln shelves from the bubbled bits of glass fused to their surfaces. My heart begins to mend from the many failures with every dried bit of greenware I dump back into the clay reclamation bucket. Because with every failure, I earn an experience which teaches me something new about my craft— but more importantly, it teaches me the resilience to be ok with failure. The internalized voice of criticism gets weaker and fainter until I can’t hear it any more. I’ve begun to listen to the other voices that tell me “right now, this is freaking amazing”.