Why are there so many ice cream flavors?
Caramel, mocha, cookies and cream, toffee, cherry pistachio, chocolate orange with white chocolate chunks…
There are SO many different flavors of ice cream. The few I’ve listed above are but a small sample of the thousands of ice cream flavors.
Why so many? Because everyone has different tastes. And you probably have several that are your favorites.
Typically, you won’t buy just one flavor. If you’re like me you’ll probably come home with a variety of flavors, even one that sounds so exotic you just HAVE to give it a go.
Image credit: Dovile Ramoskaite via Unsplash.com
The same concept goes for color preferences, home styling preferences, fashion preferences, and so many other areas of our lives.
AND the same thing goes for art preferences. Someone might like just black and white paintings, or realism, or landscapes, or abstract, or still life.
Think about all the famous painters out there and think how many different opinions are floating around about which painter is the best.
Picasso, Matisse, Van Gogh, Rembrandt, Rothko, Pollock…. Which one is your favorite? And do you think your choice is going to be the same as everyone else’s?
Of course not!
Then why do we expect and hope everyone will like our art when we put it out into the world? Because we are all humans and want to be liked.
Image credit: Rupert Britton via unsplash.com
But someone not liking our work has nothing to do with liking us, but we can get suckered into thinking that.
That’s why hearing or reading critical responses to our paintings that have taken blood, sweat, and tears to create is so difficult.
We feel rejected and that hurts. So how do we get a tougher skin and learn how not to take criticism personally?
This is easier said than done. But I’ll give you one way that has helped me and maybe it will help you. I call it translating.
Let me give you an example: Say I post an image of my recent work on Instagram and there are many positive comments but there is one, from Lucas, that says, “It’s terrible! It looks like a two-year-old could do it.”
What I do using translation is say to myself, “Lucas thinks that one painting of mine is terrible.” It’s like him saying, “Pistachio-flavored ice cream is terrible.” Or…"Van Gogh’s paintings are terrible."
Basically, I substitute the person’s name and reframe the sentence, just like I did above.
It doesn’t actually mean that any of those are terrible, it just means that Lucas doesn’t like those things.
And that’s okay.
As artists we are constantly having to strengthen our bravery and courage muscles because putting our work out in the world for all to see and feel like they can respond to takes tons of guts.
Bravo to you that do it.
* Click HERE to learn about the Art with Adele Academy.
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