Sometimes in life we mistake the purposes of the things we do in life and we confuse the means with the end. Naomi and I had an interesting conversation while we were walking in the mountains the other day. We were saying that we don’t think art and design are the ultimate purpose and reason why we are doing this. We think it’s just a path for deeper purposes in life. After all, our work affects what we are in more than the values that society uses to measure our success in terms of money and reputation.
To be very sincere, probably the biggest issue both of us have ever had in my life is having to deal with a lack of self-confidence. It’s a handicap that comes from family issues and the way we’ve been raised, but looking for guilty parties and complaining won’t solve anything. That’s why we feel than one of our main goals in life is to get rid of the feeling of lack of confidence and to learn to love and accept ourselves better. It is just part of our own path in this school of life in order to become free human beings and be in tune with life. But it’s a hard task.
People like us very often work very hard to please other people just to be accepted. It never works because they are never really accepting us, but someone else we pretend to be. That happens all of the time in art and design. It takes maturity for an artist to forget about everyone else’s opinions and just be oneself. Sometimes we are not self-confident and we try to adopt other people’s styles instead of standing up for what we really are. This is very often tagged as “lack of originality”, but I believe is just lack of self-confidence.
If you hear the words from the most renowned artists, painters, musicians, actors, etc… most of all they will tell you they dislike themselves. Many of the most acclaimed actors don’t ever watch their movies because they hate to hear their own voice and look at their own face; singers never listen to their most acclaimed albums because they don’t like to hear their own voice, and so on. The difference between them and the artists who never get any recognition is probably that they just place their ego apart and do their work the best they can because they realize they have a gift to make other people happy and on top of that, they can make a living with it.
So, even if they won’t watch the bloody movie in their life, they just do it and try to get the most they can from the experience. And they do it just being themselves with all of the consequences. You ask any of these reputed artists for an advice to young artists and most of them will tell you the same: “be yourself”.
How do we know we are being ourselves as creative people? It’s something you can tell when things come naturally. When we try to be someone else things get hard, tedious, and frustrating. Imagine that you do a wonderful imitation of someone else’s work. If people had to choose between your copy and the original they would pick the real one, no matter how good the copy is. Just because it has the original spirit and you can sense it!
On the other hand, sometimes we refuse to use the things that come easy and in a natural way just because they don’t fit our expectations of what the work should be after looking at someone else’s style or doing some specific work. Then, we end up trashing the best from ourselves and we don’t realize that probably that’s exactly what people really want to see. It’s not a matter of being commercial. It just has to do with letting your inner self come out in a natural way because that is always going to be what will connect with the rest of the people. They won’t like it more or less because it was easy, but because it came easy from you. It flowed. They can tell there’s something really personal there that came from your true self.
Of all the advices I have ever received from other artists, this is the one I always try to keep in mind: “Be yourself, no matter what they say”.
