Making art takes a lot of courage. Honestly. When you step up to the plate to write a story, or make a painting, or do any other form of creativity, you are taking part in self expression. There are two things that are scary about this:
First, when you create, you inherently put a part of yourself out on display. You can try to mask it up, sanitize it as much as you can for a core audience (which will make the whole process for less enjoyable, and take you much more time than if you go with your intuition) but no matter what, a part of yourself will leak through. Which, means that anyone seeing the results of your work is in a way reviewing and interacting with a part of you. Tim Kreider wrote "If we want the rewards of being loved we have to submit to the mortifying ordeal of being known," And that can be excruciating. To show a part of yourself to the world is to make yourself vulnerable, and to open yourself up to criticism. We are flawed, and our art will be flawed.
Which brings me to the second fear:
We are afraid of viewing ourselves.
When we make art a lot of our subconscious comes into play.
"Why do you like certain colors better than others?"
"Why are you drawing dogs so much?"
"Why aren't you drawing dogs? Did something happen?"
"This background looks dark, I think you have problems."
These comments may say something about the viewer's tastes, but as we create, we have to ask questions to ourselves. Maybe there's reasons why you love certain subjects, and you didn't realize that they had so much of an impact in your life. Maybe you have an aversion to using certain colors or depicting certain things that stems from deep trauma. Maybe trauma shows in everything you make. Either way, when we make art, we are always having a conversation with our audience. What we don't always recognize, is that we are also having a conversation with ourselves.
And that may be more frightening than any comment we receive.
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