The Inner Critic

“If you hear a voice within you say “you cannot paint,” then by all means paint, and that voice will be silenced.”      

                                                                              –     Vincent van Gogh

I have been thinking a lot about my Inner Critic.  That nasty, paralyzing voice that tells me I cannot paint.  Where does this voice come from??

One school of thought, cultivated from about $20,000 of therapy, is that it is because “my mother was an artist and I somehow internalized that there was only room for one artist in the family and that position had already been taken.” 

Granted, my mom was an exceptionally talented classical pianist, painter and needle pointer, who brought a tremendous amount of creativity to just about everything she did.  And she did a lot.  I can remember as a child playing on the grounds of the Barnes Foundation in Merion, while my mother studied with Violette de Mazia.  Or being forced into Colonial costume as “the little butter churning girl” while my mom curated The Paper Mill House, a historical landmark and museum she helped renovate and build from the ground up.  Or the many hours we scoured the Chesapeake together, looking for Chippendale chairs disguised as trash.

My Mom - Dorothy Elizabeth Povey (Taken in 2006)

But the truth is that my mom completely encouraged me and was always my biggest fan, so I don’t buy into the therapist’s view.  And it’s not as if I haven’t been a highly creative person throughout my own life.  I’ve thrown myself with reckless abandon into sewing, cooking, gardening, pottery, remodeling, flea marketing and a host of other creative pursuits.  Professionally, I’ve spent the last 25 years as a consumer insight and brand strategist, which, when done properly, is an extremely creative line of work.  But whenever it came time to make the Grand Canyon sized leap from “craft” to “fine art,” I would always end up with a lump in my throat the size of a hamster.

I remember taking a screen-printing class in my junior year of college with a professor and artist by the name of David Smyth.  Besides his bold, take-no-prisoners painting style, and the fact that he was already represented in several museum collections, David was notorious in Ithaca for two other things.  The first, was that he bore an uncanny resemblance to Mick Jagger.  And the second, was that he dated a lot of his students.  When I confided my Inner Critic fears to David in class one day, he belly laughed, clapped me on the shoulder and hooted, “Well, you’re just going to have to get over it,” with all the bravado you'd expect from someone who looked just like Mick Jagger.  The little hamster quivered in my throat.

David Smyth - Then and Now

If only I knew then what I am just beginning to realize now - that the Inner Critic is a common and widespread creative problem.  When asked how he managed his Inner Critic, Junot Diaz, author of the Pulitzer Prize winning, “The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao,” responded, “You’ve raised one of the thorniest dialectics of working, which is that you need your critical self: without it you can’t write, but in fact the critical self is what’s got both feet on the brakes of your process.”

I completely agree that my critical self has been a highly valuable and useful tool, it has helped me set the bar for standards of excellence in my professional life.  In marketing and advertising, it has been essential in helping me discern the great idea from the merely good, many, many times.  So, my goal isn’t to silence this voice, as Van Gogh suggested, but to learn how to use it effectively and productively.

Malcolm Gladwell’s, “Outliers,” put forth the premise that to be an expert in any field requires a devotion to one’s craft for at least 10,000 hours, which is about 5 years at 40 hours per week.  This challenges the accepted notion that genius or being gifted is simply a matter of innate talent, when in fact, closer analysis of success stories proves out that the element of innate talent plays a lesser role in achieving expert status than one might think.

Gladwell gives examples like the Beatles, who before making it big had logged more than 10,000 hours of playing on stage in four years while similar bands had only a fraction of that experience.  Bill Gates had logged in more than 10,000 hours of programming by the time he dropped out of Harvard his Freshman year, giving him an enormous advantage over other developers at that time.

The art community’s translation of Gladwell’s premise is that to be a good painter, you need to make 100 bad paintings.  Juliette Jeanclaude writes, “Whatever art form you are practicing, making bad work is essential, freeing up the mind and the pressure. Bad work plants the seeds for the good work that will come later on.”  I like this approach.  It doesn’t negate or silence the Inner Critic, who clearly has an important role to play, but no longer allows this voice to paralyze my efforts.  It gives me permission to just do the work, however dreadful, planting seeds for better results in the future.

This year I am committed to rolling up my sleeves and making some bad paintings.  With freedom, expansiveness and a sense of discovery.  I can already feel my little hamster breathing a big sigh of relief.

“Your work is to discover your work and then, with all your heart, to give yourself to it.” – Buddha

Linda Povey - Bodhisattva
Encaustic and metal on panel
6x6"