The Art of Imperfection

    I made a promise to myself the first time I sat in front of a canvas with a paintbrush. While painting, I was not ever allowed ever allowed to interrupt what I was doing by second guessing myself. While I was painting, I could never view anything I did as a mistake. Just keep going. The process is the point. The experience, the moment. The art I sought was the doing. The end result, the finished painting, was a byproduct. 

    I never started with an idea of what the painting should look like, in order to work without ever judging whether I was executing the idea like I wanted to. Can't fall short of the target if there is no target. Even more importantly, can't worry about failing if the only goal is to do. 

    Pick a brush, pick a color, pick an area to apply the color and just do. A lot of times the painting would start to look kind of like something and I would nudge it along in that direction as I went. But still there were no mistakes. Even if I painted over something, what I had painted first wasn't a mistake, it was just a stage in the process, and in the when moment I did it, it was what I was supposed to be doing.

    The reason for the very deliberate decision was to out think the very perfectionist and self critical thought processes that made it very difficult to even begin, much less finish, a project. Making up stories is my first true love, but my brain made actually trying to write one down a tortuous ordeal (still an issue though not to the same extreme). If picking up a paintbrush summoned the same demons holding a pencil and notebook did, nothing would get done. So it was critical from the very beginning to have a process free from the mental noise. 

    As a side effect, painting became an active meditative state. So much of my brain was tied up the the action, and the constant critical thoughts never held any power over the process. The negative thoughts didn't end, but they were background annoyances unable to disrupt what I was doing. 

    I could just... flow. Which allowed my mind to just be. And painting became a process of simultaneous doing and being, stillness in action.

    Now, many many years later, I rarely start to paint without having an idea of what I want it to end up looking like. But the freedom from judgement is deeply ingrained. And the doing is still all that matters, the experience of creating. The end result just the byproduct. So there is no reason to criticize, in any negative sense, during or after. 

    So not only did painting become a 'safe space' from my own mental negativity, it created a foundation from which to view other things. And how I view myself in relation to other things. It helped develop a habitual way of thinking that allows me to see things not colored or distorted by how my brain automatically organizes and classifies and labels and judges. Everything is allowed to be imperfect because everything is in the process of being and becoming. In those moments, everything is Art expressing itself.