The Cage of Consistency
In the last Healthy Art Practice article, I shared a quote on social by fellow artist Glenn Hernandez differentiating art practice work from work that you're creating for, say, a gallery. The fact that this needs to be clarified speaks to a distortion that many artist have, and it inspired me to explore the role of consistency in a healthy art practice.
Ah, the cage of consistency.
In the art world, it's sometimes insinuated (or stated outright) that consistency, or the lack of it, is what separates the ‘serious’ artist from the amateur. For me, just saying the word triggers a visceral recall of the many years in which I felt frustrated, lost, and like a failure, all because I seemingly could not achieve this mystical ingredient on which a successful art career depended. Do you relate?
For instance, have you also found that your tendency is to try a LOT of different things? Do you move on to something new instead of sticking with something you've learned and allowing yourself to develop? Have you ever struggled with remaining consistent after finding a style or subject matter you liked?
This has always been me. Big time. For years, I suffered greatly because I saw this as such a character flaw. But those years gave me some clarity, simply because I struggled so much.
I now can see there were two main reasons I could not be consistent, especially in my early years:
I learn through variety. When I explore mediums, I thrive in an environment that offers a lot of new stimulation, new materials, and an opportunity to think in new ways. But to be consistent, I felt I had to give up this driving force of creativity, making my inspiration go limp, leaving me stranded.
Until recently, I didn't know that I had ADHD. This explains so much about my struggle with consistency--neurologically speaking, it's not in my stockpile of capabilities. But I actually don't think you have to have ADHD to have this be an issue. I hear a lot of creatives say they struggle with wanting to try everything at the expense of consistently focusing on one.
So I bounced around for years, interested in a LOT of different things, and also feeling like I was doing something wrong. Learning new things is what drives my creativity, so I followed it and was all over the place. But I also believed it was a deficiency, so I always felt like it was a failure. See the trap? See the cage?
But I want to suggest something by way of analogy: imagine someone telling you at 12 years old that you needed to pick a career and then just focus on it. That would have been insane, right? Because early in our lives, we couldn't have known what we wanted to do or be--we had to live, try things, have experiences, make messes in order to learn to know what it feels like when we found something true for us. And then over time, we knew more about our talents, aspirations, and preferences; through experience, they naturally appeared, and when they did, we focused in on those more and invested all of our focus on that career, or that person, or that endeavor. We call this healthy development.
To be clear, consistency is a wonderful thing in an art career--if it's time. And when it's time, it happens naturally. Of course, it always requires some discipline, but the focusing in just feels right.
Developing your style and voice takes time, experiences, learning, exploring, jumping from interest to interest so that eventually, you find that you just know what's ‘you’. But you have to discover it. Bouncing around and exploring is an essential part of developing creatively in the earlier stages. But it's not exclusive to the earlier stages of being an artist; I find that I return to this stage when I am making a big shift in my work--I have to go back to exploring, experimenting, trying everything. Being inconsistent at the beginning stage of anything is part of the process. It’s the brain’s way of learning what and what not to pay attention to.
I'm happy to say that I feel so much compassion for that previous version of me. I worked so hard at something that was never going to be achievable for me; but even more poignant is that now I see that kind of consistency at that time wasn't necessary for me to find my best work. But exploration was.
Following that creative impulse up, down, and all over the place has been what made developing and coming into my own style and voice possible. And now, I feel like I'm naturally more consistent because I allowed that ‘finding’ process to unfold and organically move to refinement.
If you're not at the part in the process where consistency feels right or even achievable, I hope this helps you to realize that it will come. You're just at a different stage of the process where exposure to many things is not only appropriate, but necessary. Don't feel like you have to rush through or past this; the process works just fine and this is what ‘trusting the process’ is all about.
