August 2023: Perfection

When I started Easy Does It almost two years ago, one of the first topics I expected to write about was perfectionism. It was the most commonly cited creativity villain in the messages I had received from followers, which were all variations on: "I want to be an artist, but I don't know how to get past my perfectionism."

When I went to write about it though, it felt leaden on the page. What I actually wanted to offer was a living breathing alternative. Perfectionism is like a small archway that tells you: you must walk through here. We don't have to take it apart, chew it into small pieces, and scatter them in the desert. It is most easily defeated by simply walking around it.

For me, walking around it looks like the basics I am always writing about here: beginning, beginning again. Swatching, playing, exploring materials, being honest and asking different questions than is this good?

But perhaps I'm finally ready to write about perfectionism, head on. We've already gutted it of its power by making marks and living to tell about it. We can see that creativity is an expansive place with trails everywhere, and the wider our vision gets, the smaller that little arch appears. So let's take a closer look.