When you start working creatively, you may find, that gradually, your mind-set changes: you may discover that you change the expectations you have for your creative outcomes, the speed of your learning, and why you are doing your creative work.
You may also find that you begin to value what you do differently, and that you develop a sense of continuity between your earlier creative results, what you do now, and what you intend to do in the future. How you value what you do right now and how you think about your creative future is changing.
Such thoughts might come along with further reflections about yourself: doing creative work often questions the way we know ourselves and this is embedded in the wider contexts of scribing our own identity.
Creative work changes you.
The creative work that you do may also change your beliefs about such themes as ‘talent’, or ‘creativity’, how creative work happens, and your legitimacy to engage in creative pursuits.
It may happen that whilst you are shifting your approaches and ideas about creative activities, the people around you still hold the same views about creativity and associated themes as they always have – and about you in connection to these themes.
You may now discover that their opinions about you and their comments about your artmaking can make you doubtful of your own new - but still fragile - creative growth.
With or without the challenge of other people’s opinions, it may still happen, that though you are moving forward nicely with your creative pursuits, you still have doubtful moments when you ‘flop’ back into an older version of your self in which you were extremely critical of your creative outcomes. Or, you may have negative internal chatter that makes you feel very insecure about your current artmaking.
Keep going with your art.
The internal chatter will become more quiet. Though, …. ,some of it might never go away… Such is life in art.
Even if you are faced with other people’s unhelpful comments – and in all likeliness they do not mean to cause any harm …. keep going. Instead, and, in addition, you may have to grow some resilience …
There are a lot of misunderstandings around about the nature of ‘talent’, who should and should not do art, what a good drawing looks like, and how long it takes to develop the skill to produce correct proportions. Even though I have been working in art and design for over 40 years, and hold a PhD from research into creative practice, I regularly come across people whose frameworks for thinking about artmaking cannot be changed in spite of my best efforts.