Are Your Artistic Limitations a Blessing or a Curse?
When I was first starting to make my name as an artist in my community, it was interesting how frequently I had to turn down possible art jobs. I was painting landscapes and florals in watercolor, but I received requests for mural paintings, portraits, graphic design, children’s book illustration…a smorgasbord of variety! And I hated turning down work! But I knew my limitations and no matter how creatively I looked at it, there was just NO WAY my watercolor would translate well to mural painting. I knew my limitations.
Limitations come in many forms.
We have technical limitations; skills that we have yet to develop that hinder us.
We have limitations due to the medium we have chosen; watercolor can’t do everything that oil painting does, and vice versa.
We struggle with the limitation of not knowing our style, being unsure of how to express ourselves.
We might even face physical limitations; vision problems, trembling hands, color deficiency, injury.
We might feel limited by geography, living far from the instructors we wish to learn from, or by our learning style, time constraints or budget.
The beauty of art is that boundaries offer possibility.
BECAUSE I had limitations as to what my medium could do, I learned how to compensate for watercolor’s transparency and fluidity, how to accentuate it instead of fighting it.
Because I wasn’t spending time painting portraits or illustrating books, I learned how to paint the subjects I loved instead of trying to paint all subjects equally well.
Because I had a short attention span, I learned how to paint quickly and loosen up my subject rather than spending hours on realistic detail.
Because I didn’t know how to paint certain elements, I grew innovative in how I camouflaged my weaknesses by intensifying my strengths.
Weaknesses don’t have to be something we hide.
When we start painting, we often find ourselves fixed on mistakes, working to fix and conceal and obscure. Beating ourselves up for overworking or failing. But as I grew into my style, making peace with the artist that I was instead of struggling to match my perceived “perfect artist,” I found that mistakes began to inform my paintings in new ways. My usual strategy now, when I make a “mistake” in my painting, is to choose to display it as a feature of the painting, like I’d intended to paint it that way all along. By painting “I planned it like this,” instead of “How can I hide this?” my mistakes look fresh and spontaneous, intentional magic; truly “happy accidents.”
Limitations never leave us. We will always be striving to overcome a weakness, resolve a struggle, find a better way of getting ourselves onto the paper. But limitations are also what make us unique and connect us as humans. An openly flawed person is someone I can relate to, and an un-perfect painting has a living quality that a perfect painting could never achieve.