Someone once told me the following story about a young woman they knew who was attending art school:

The woman and her classmates were given a difficult assignment. Each had to produce a painting, which would take a great deal of time and effort to make. 

On the day the paintings were due they arrived in class eager to show off their work, but unaware that in order to complete their projects a final task was required. In what surely must have seemed like a joke, they were instructed to destroy the artwork on which they had just worked so hard. The instructor was quite serious. They had to destroy their work, or get a failing grade for the assignment.

What kind of teacher would require such a thing? A very caring one it turns out, because those students were actually being taught, in a very real and memorable way, a crucial skill. They were learning to let go of their work. It is something many artists have trouble doing, but is absolutely necessary in the professional arena. Simply put, if what you make becomes so precious to you that you are unable to part with it, you are going to find it extremely difficult to make a living in a creative field.

If I had been in that class, I very well may have been one of the students who failed because “precious” and I have long had our own issues. For me, the difficulty centers mainly on a certain scenario in which I have found myself a thousand times. It typically plays out like this:

I am working on a drawing, painting, etc., and it is turning out well. Maybe even a little better than I had anticipated. I am starting to really like it, and have an idea I think will make it even better. As I am about to put my plan into action a thought suddenly pops into my head, causing me to stop: “What if I ruin it?” 

This is, of course, a valid consideration, as I HAVE ruined many things in the past, and therein lies my dilemma. If I am making something I feel is “pretty good,” is it better to stop and end up with something I like? Or, take a chance and possibly create something I love, knowing however, there is the potential to completely wreck it in the process?

I was pondering this very question, paintbrush hovering uncertainly over a collage in progress, when I realized something interesting. Almost all of the artwork I was tempted to change, but didn’t (out of fear) was sitting in the closet, or at the bottom of a drawer. I liked it enough to save, but not enough to want to see it, because in my mind, it wasn’t really finished. So much for preciousness. 

So what happened when I dug up some of my old work and made the changes I had been too scared to make before?  Well, there were a lot of disasters! But it also resulted in several pieces with which I am finally and truly happy. The image on top is one of those pieces. The image below shows what it looked like while sitting in a drawer for over a year, before I did what I wanted to do all along.  

Now I am thinking of how many things, artwork and otherwise, I have left unfinished in my life that may benefit from a little less preciousness. I am certain that some will result in disasters, but how great will it be if some of them, or even one of them, results in a wish being fulfilled ?