Bradford County– GC Myers, 1994
When we are in competition with ourselves, and match our todays against our yesterdays, we derive encouragement from past misfortunes and blemishes. Moreover, the competition with ourselves leaves unimpaired our benevolence toward our fellow men.
–Eric Hoffer, The Passionate State of Mind (1955)
I love this passage from my favorite autodidact, Eric Hoffer. As someone who I would consider a competitive person throughout much of my life, I can tell you that life is much simpler and easy when you begin competing only with yourself.
It’s true in life and especially true as an artist.
Early on in, when I first began showing my work and was still developing my artistic voice, everything was a competition. I was constantly comparing and judging my work against that of other artists. And since art is a forever thing, this meant that I was putting myself in competition with all artists. And not just the local, not just the person in the next town over who did lovely watercolors. No, it was a competition with artists everywhere, every corner of the globe
And not just the living contemporary artists. No, it was competition with every living and dead person who ever smeared something on a surface to express some emotion. It was a competition that went from every artist today going back to the first time that early man put his handprint on a cave wall.
I have mentioned here before that early on in my career I had read that author John Irving, when going into a bookstore, saw every book in there, as well as every book ever written, as being his competition. He viewed his task as a writer as being the equivalent of being an Olympic athlete competing against the very best the world has to offer. That meant, he would have to practice his craft with all the dedication and focus of an Olympian.
I took that to heart then and believed that If I worked long and hard, I could compete with anyone. That was probably a good thing at that point in that it gave me the focus and discipline that I needed, as well as a sense of urgency. Without these things, I doubt I would have developed much beyond what the level at which I began.
But while it was beneficial from that perspective, it was also often disheartening. Going to galleries and museums back then, while I usually left with some bit of inspiration, often left me discouraged. All I could see was what I couldn’t or didn’t do with my own work.
And never would.
As a result, I felt bad about my own work then. And I sometimes even resented the talents of those artists I was viewing, much to my chagrin. I found myself disappointed both as an artist and a human being.
And that feeling was hard to live with.
However, these feelings did make me push myself even a bit harder to refine my voice as an artist. It was both bad and good.
So, I worked while harboring these feelings until years when I began to understand that this perceived competition with others only existed in my mind. Yes, it had served a purpose for me at the time, but it was no longer needed.
I could now fully enjoy the works of others without comparing their work to mine. Getting rid of the competitive envy that I had carried for so long felt great. Liberating.
However, I found that I was still competitive but now it was only a wrestling match with myself. It is much like Hoffer put it, a competition pitting my todays against my yesterdays. I can now look back at the failures and misfortunes, as Hoffer put it, of my earlier work and see where I have grown in many ways.
It is both encouraging and inspiring, even when I find myself cringing at some of those early pieces. More than that, it is a much healthier form of competition. I no longer feel that I am competing with anyone. Not with any contemporary artist, not the Modernists nor the Impressionists nor anyone going back to that prehistoric artist, Thag, in his cave admiring the bull he has just painted. He certainly was not worried about competition.
Plus, competing only with myself and not with all of history has an upside. It still provides enough competition that it spurs me to want to work harder, to delve deeper with my work.
To be better today than I was yesterday or twenty years ago.
That, I can live with…
The painting at the top is from before I began showing my work, one of those pieces I often revisit. I wrote about this piece, Bradford County, here on the blog back in 2011.
Redtree Times 