Anonymous · 29d
hi teeb!! my question is: how do you deal with a stubborn artblock?? Ive tried mostly everything but haven't gotten over it, (studies, peer critics, experimenting, etc) and nothingg is working @_@, and I guess the follow up question is: how do you start loving ur art again after an artblock?? thank u n i hope ur having a good week!!
i feel like "artblock," over the years, has become an overgrown, monolithic term haphazardly applied to any kind of personal disconnect between an artist and their art. there's just about as many potential causes for this as there are words in the english language. maybe you feel like your artistic "eye" has outpaced your hands. maybe you no longer identify with the things you used to find joy in depicting. maybe you're moments away from an identity crisis. et cetera.
as such, it would be basically impossible for me to sufficiently address your highly personal circumstances—so i'm gonna resort to some very generic advice instead.
are you having fun? if you're not having fun right now, what sounds like fun instead? do you think you can feasibly achieve this, or at least work towards it? it's okay if something other than creating things sounds more fun right now, too.
how's your relationship to your output? do you find yourself preoccupied with numbers? do you find it unforgivable if you didn't work on anything that day, week, month? this may be normalized in many corners of the internet, but it's objectively corrosive.
on a related note, how frequently do you compare yourself disfavorably to other creators? everyone's got their own stuff going on, and nobody's ever gonna see the perfect vision in your head that never quite makes it onto the canvas. sometimes, in the past, i would get asked how to achieve the artistic output i used to uphold, particularly for my comics. the answer is actually very simple: break your body and spirit in order to drag your mangled self across some kind of hallucinated finish line. i would not recommend the experience.
i didn't actually start "loving" my art consistently until, like, 2020 or so. i spent many years feeling frustrated and humiliated about my works. nothing seemed to turn out the way i wanted it to. there were times when every piece felt like pulling teeth, and looking at them after the fact still makes me wince.
but my art wouldn't have existed if i didn't make it. and, to this day, i still occasionally encounter people who have found such joy and meaning in stuff i made almost a decade ago.
that matters, to me at least.
