I feel like it was inevitable that at some point I would have to tackle this here (it will likely crop up again). I'm currently having a real bout of imposter syndrome... what if I'm just not good enough?
I'm fairly certain that everyone feels like this at some point (your friends are far cooler, you're winging it at work, you have no idea how to raise children... etc), there's a bit of 'fake it 'till you make it' in all of us (and excessive amounts in the Apprentice candidates!) but right now I'm having a bit of a wobble.
I've always felt very confident in my printmaking pursuits, after all, I only started a couple of years ago, it's a second career, excuse, excuse ..... need to stop making excuses for why I still feel like I'm allowed to be finding my artistic feet. I signed up to do a masters degree, time to face up to my own ambition and stop faffing about.
I'm completely awed by the other artists on the course - they all seem like 'real' artists who know what they're talking about, who have solid ideas and ways of working, who know what they're about. I feel like I'm just good at sounding like I know what I'm talking about, but without any real depth. I've just read the examples of past residency applications which I think was the final straw in feeling completely unable to compete. Even after writing the study statement I'm still not entirely sure what my art is meant to be about. I'm wondering whether I'm fighting a process, totally uncertain, grasping at straws or just completely lacking in artistic ability.
I think the fact I'm trying to make something unlike anything I've made previously isn't helping (I'm currently working on a hanging piece for the interim exhibition). I can't decide exactly what I'm trying to say with the piece, and I'm putting a lot of pressure on it and being really hyper critical of tiny things like the edges of the paper, but feeling like the main things on the paper are just totally rubbish and I need several years to figure out how to do it properly.
It's annoying and I wonder whether it's coming back to my notion that what I make has to be hard, and technical, and take ages, and have lots of steps, and...and...and... just settling for the stunning print of lichen is far too easy.
I keep coming back to my process. Why is it that I think art has to be hard? Or is what I do 'hard' it's just that because I can do it it's not 'hard' to me? That's an idea I haven't considered before. I had a great couple of hours yesterday afternoon inking up lichen and printing it as well as making monoprints with scrim to look like the ends of stacked up harvested timber. My husband commented something like "that's cleverer than I could manage" (which surprised me because he's really rather artistic) and I smiled but inwardly I thought, "no, it's really easy, bit of ink and run it through the press, I bet the kids could manage it".
Is that my problem? Because it's a one stage ink-and-press that it's 'too easy'. Never mind the finding the lichen, pressing it for a week, mixing the colour, rolling the ink and inking the lichen, the fact that I can do it makes it easy and therefore I have to do more....????
I inked a plate and put the lichen on top of the ink and pressed it to use the lichen as a stencil, then I took the ghost which gives a wonderful effect with dark outlines where the lichen was. Again, it's a wonderful effect, but still too simple.....???
I made a monotype of circles using scrim as texture pieces to tear up and patchwork, and then I used the inked lichen on the ghost of one of these. I'm really pleased with the effect of both of these, but again, they're part of something bigger as they're far too simple to stand alone.
Am I expecting too much of myself? Or not enough? Am I underestimating my own skills and knowledge? I'm slightly petrified that I'm going to turn up at the interim exhibition and let the other students and our tutor down with a piece that's not of a high enough standard to do the exhibition justice because it's so experimental. Maybe I should have just concentrated on making a reduction linocut - stick to what I know and improve on the skills I feel some confidence in.
But that's not why I took the leap into this course. I have to remember that. I wanted to experiment, and I wanted to figure out what it is that I want my work to communicate and the themes I want to explore. In experimenting with techniques I'm going to have to accept that there will be some technical aspects that could be done better at this stage f I want to include those images.
In writing this I thought about the times in my life that I did feel confident: in my dissertation for my undergraduate degree and in my job as a lecturer in FE. The thing they have in common was researching themes I was really interested in. Maybe that's something I should remember in my art work now, those old themes that I've always been interested in: our enjoyment of the outdoors, and caring for the environment. This is just presenting it in a different way, as someone who uses a lot of words I need to get used to the idea of presenting complex ideas in a non verbal way. Maybe that's what's really worrying me: the title. The only chance for a verbal 'explanation'.
Oh good, now I have something else to worry about!