The Secret Gift of Perseverance

After painting my heart out for a month and a half to get ready for a collection launch, and an in-person art show, I was exhausted. They say the more creativity you use, the more that you have, and while it is very true, a point still comes where your mind and body and soul need to rest. A place where ideas live, but they do not thrive or lead to excitement. A place where creativity comes, but no action can be taken. 

I’d worked and worked to create four pieces that I couldn’t have had any more pride in. They brought an incredible amount of joy and fulfillment into my studio. It was a good collection. That’s what I told myself, and that’s what I believed. 

I sent a collection preview to my email subscribers. I marketed and posted and wrote about my art until I thought people must be absolutely sick and tired of hearing from me. I packed each painting up carefully in “The Beauty of Small Things” collection, and took them to my in-person show. 

I had the best looking display I’d ever had, and despite the rain, there were quite a few people making their way through the streets of Quakertown. I had high hopes for this collection of four small paintings; I loved them. All day, I watched as event go-ers walked past my tent. So many stopped, pointed at my art to each other from the middle of the street, and kept walking - ignoring anything I said, and even refusing to smile back. No one came into my little space except two or three people who wished me luck with selling my “gorgeous work.” No one would talk to me about my artwork, and at the end of the day, I’d sold one print, and one drawing of a horse. 

My entire collection was intact, and coming home. 

The collection launched Monday online. Everyone had access to it. My collectors on my email list, the public, and I’d talked about the release over and over for a couple of weeks. 

And still, not a single piece sold. 

I went to send out another email reminder, only to find that my email service was down, and I couldn’t send anything to my subscribers. The final blow to my little bubble of hope. 

Doubt started creeping in. Maybe it wasn’t as good of a collection as I thought it was. Maybe I didn’t create good work. All my paintings were ugly. All of my friends’ positive feedback was lies.

But something still nagged at my mind. There was one painting that I had wanted to create, and hadn’t had the time to complete to release it with the collection. Perhaps it’d be a good way to solidify the doubt. One more ugly painting. 

I pulled a canvas from my stack, and as I started this next painting, in the defeat of a collection launch “gone wrong,” I told myself I was a fraud. I couldn’t paint. I didn’t know what I was doing. No one liked my work, and the positive reactions were simply out of pity. I was in a tragic and pathetic place. 

I blocked in the flowers, and as I stepped back to look at my progress, I gave up. On the first layer of paint. On my painting. On a stage known notoriously as “the ugly phase.” And it’s called that for a reason - believe me. Every painting has an ugly phase to work through. I know this, and yet in my exhaustion and defeat, I let it stop me from doing something I loved. 

I took the painting off my easel and stayed out of the studio for days. My defeat slowly turned to guilt, and that painting - out of guilt - ended up back on my easel. The original plan was to get the flowers to a higher level of refinement before starting on the leaves and filler. But I’d added more flowers than my reference photo had, I’d changed them all up, and upon zooming into a part of my reference for details, it wasn’t even a picture of a real flower. It was fake. I was so lost. My reference really didn’t have filler, and I couldn’t leave the painting like it was: flowers floating in space.

I dug out my favorite green, and I painted ferns because I didn’t know what else to do. I painted ferns until I was tired of painting ferns, and then I painted some more. 

Despite the lack of hope I’d had for this piece, I’d recorded some video content anyway. I put a clip together, had it scheduled to post on social media, and told myself: releasing this into the world will surely solidify that this is terrible. 

It was a clip that started with a blank canvas, and ended right smack dab in the middle where my doubt lived. This would be the end of the end of the end. The thing that led to me putting my brushes down for good. 

After spending hours only a few inches away from my painting, sitting in a world of green ferns, I stepped back to find, it was coming along rather nicely. The ferns started pulling the whole painting together, and I could see the vision I’d originally had coming through. 

The clip was posted to socials, and blew up on Facebook. Over the next three days, my video received over 6,000 views, got over 500 likes, and almost four times as many comments as my videos normally got. The people commenting weren’t my friends and family and collectors. They were people the algorithm snagged - they had no clue who I was - and their comments were full of good things. 

I was stunned. Totally amazed, shocked, and it all gave me the willpower to finish the painting. With that came the idea to add ladybugs. Butterflies. Bees…and somehow, this piece - that was supposed to be ugly, that I didn’t believe in - has become the best painting I’ve created. 

All this to say that a little perseverance in a place of darkness can go a really long way. Goals and dreams and ambitions aren’t meant to be abandoned. They aren’t meant to be given up on. They are meant to be executed and achieved and followed. If you have an ugly painting, then you can paint over it. But if you have no painting, there’s nothing to grow from. 

My collection remains available, but I look at it now from a different place. Not a place of defeat, but from a place of self-love. I made these paintings. I love them. I think they are beautiful. And until the right collector comes along, they are meant to bring me joy in my own space. I’ve got one more painting now to enjoy for a while. And the right person will find each painting when they need it the most.