Obstacles

One of the most essential qualities for an artist is persistence. 

Knowing how to draw? A eye for colour? A vivid imagination? A burning desire to share your work? All of these pale into comparison to the ability to pick yourself up and keep going when facing challenges.

I am not even talking here about bad feedback or indifference from your audience- I have blogged before about this, and how vulnerable sharing your work makes you feel. I am not talking either about self doubt or imposter syndrome but simply about the scrappiness you need to finish certain pieces, improve your technique, defeat your limitations and expand your skillset.

Over the last three months I have got really into cyanotypes, but it hasn’t been an easy journey. The basic grasps of the technique are simple, and after a few attempts I was getting some great prints. I thought I had mastered the process and it would be plain sailing from here on. How wrong was I! 

First, a batch of prints I was working on started to wrap and wrinkle (which strangely hadn’t been an issue on my first few attempts- beginners luck I suppose!). I tried weighing them down, I even ironed a couple to no avail. I started using thicker paper and thankfully, this seems to be doing the trick. A good learning of course, but it does mean I have to redo the two series I was working on to make sure they are all on the new paper stock!

I also faced issues with my UV lamp blowing up! I am now in the process of reviewing my set-up and hope the new version will work better, so this issue is still not completely resolved, and my prints need to wait a bit longer..

In parallel, I am also working on another piece which is currently resisting- I know what I want to do, and the design is relatively simple, but with a few specific requirements that make it more complex than it looks. So far all my ideas for making it work are failing, so I have to learn new techniques, experiment and think creatively about how I can achieve what I want.

I am not giving up though, on the prints or the other piece. The goal is clear: I have works to finish and I will not rest until I am happy with them and  am ready to share them with the world

In all these cases, I know I will get there. The start of my screenprinting journey was similar, littered with issues to overcome and mistakes to learn from, and a sense of triumph when a problem was successfully resolved. 

But beyond managing to finish these pieces, what keeps me going when I face difficulties is the thoughts that those tricky months of learning new things and solving issues will open the door to new approaches or lead to improvements in my techniques across my practice. So every obstacle I encounter in my work has the potential to send me on a different path than I would otherwise have taken, and this is a great way to travel.

All this experimentation along the way is the seed of something new, and I can’t wait to discover where it leads me to..

This screenprint gave me a lot of trouble when I was working on it. I ended up scraping all my work and starting again and it turned up great in the end. Persistence pays!