I’ve talked before about perfectionism, I thought I’d dealt with it but just recently it has come back to bite me on the bum again! I‘ve done lots of things round the house recently, changing stuff, repainting etc (I say “I” but I just have the ideas, it is my long suffering husband who does the DIY) and I’ve been really pleased with how things have worked out…..until a couple of things didn’t. Nothing major, our food processor broke and I ordered a new one but it was the wrong size, some cupboard door handles trapped my fingers after I requested them put on in a certain way. Bizarrely I found myself irrationally upset by these mistakes, so much so that they clouded over any of my previous successes which all turned to ashes.
After some thought I identified that the upset was about perfectionism. They punctured my illusion of being “perfect”. But the artistic process is all about making mistakes, redoing, learning as you go along and the end result, for me anyway, is about being “good enough”.
So I’ll illustrate that with a set of 16 cards I am planning on making. I’ve printed a pattern on the back of them, they are still blank on the front. If I was going for “perfect” the patterns would all look the same and there wouldn’t be smudges of orange ink on the blank fronts, but that isn’t what they are and I’m happy with their imperfections, they are “good enough”.