Stalemate

Perfectionist— a person who refuses to accept any standard short of perfection. But perfection isn't obtainable. This is a collectively agreed-upon fact. So, a perfectionist, in its purest sense, is someone who never does anything.

And that's where the story begins.

Over the years, I talked to an artist who consistently spoke on an idea she was trying to produce. Year after year, she was in a stalemate. She couldn't get the budget to execute her vision, and wouldn't start production till she could "do it right". 

It made sense– to a certain degree– why she didn’t want to bring an idea out of her mind and into the world if she knew she didn’t have the resources to do it properly. The problem was that the fixation on this single idea froze her ability to produce anything in the meantime. She was always waiting for the money, for the collaborators, for the proper platform with the proper exposure.

The ideas were all there, but they were divorced from the reality that these things were never going to be achieved without effort on the front end.

There wasn't any forward momentum to build from.

Creativity is a commodity that is never really all that hard to find. Half the people I know have dreamed up three lifetimes worth of projects– but only a few have pulled these out from the folds of their brain and into the world. The hard truth is that nobody can access the "portfolio" in your head.

Idle creativity is worth that of daydreams.

You can't iterate nothing.

Well, aren't art directors hired for ideas? Ideas are ultimately their deliverables, right? Yes, but the key element is this– to get to a point where your ideas are worth their weight in gold, you've got to show that you have a track record of actually making them happen. 

Stagnation and indecision kill. We over-analyze the steps to take, and in the process, lose the privilege of taking any steps at all.

I've seen promising artists snuff themselves out before they've even had the chance to put together a single complete body of work.

What are artists supposed to do when they find themselves in this position? I see it in two distinct ways.

First, go ahead and start creating whatever your vision is. There isn’t a rule that says you have to publish (or even show anyone) everything you create. The era of social media has lowered the threshold of difficulty to get things out in the world. While this is great for the exchange of ideas and quick feedback, it becomes tempting to blast out half-baked ideas. Keep it in the vault, but actually keep something in the vault. Actively playing around with ideas you’re not comfortable “doing for real” yet is going to help you push the concept further down the road, troubleshoot future problems, and have a solid proof of concept when you’re looking for collaborators.

Second, one of the best practices to build up skills is to emulate your favorite artists. There are two important catches here. First catch— don’t emulate the work they’re doing now. Do the work they were doing when they had the resources you have now. What was young Warhol doing? Leibovitz? Haring? Now you’ve eliminated the excuses of budget. The second catch— pick artists that are both inside and outside of your medium. Multidisciplinary creators have visual identities which transcend the status quo. Set designers have a different approach to painting. Painters have a different approach to photography. Skills build on each other and mutate in interesting ways when they hop over to a different medium of expression.

Nobody needs to see your rough drafts and conceptual scribbles but you. There’s always an opportunity to move forward.

As one of my creative direction mentors aptly says– "perfection is the enemy of good".