Musings on liking your own work

All the Colors & Paths #1, at Altered Aesthetics'
Straight Trippin' Juried Show
February 28-March 28, 2013

If you don't like your own work, how can you: 

1.  expect anyone else to like it -- ever; 
2.  get pleasure out of its creation; 
3.  want to do anything other than use it for kindling. 

Will you love every piece?

Don't expect to love every piece. Because making art is a journey, there will probably be some odd turns or dead ends:

1. You win inevitably make an awkward and damaging splash or drop the brush or do something that in the cold light of day makes you cringe. Learn from it, and enjoy the pleasure of making art. Forgive your child or your cat if one or both might be the culprit
2. When you get a new paintbrush or color or other piece of equipment, your first experiments might be happy accidents that you love (and sell), noodlings that you will use as reference material, or something to  recycle by painting on the back.
3. Not that this would happen to you, but in my earnest determination to get back to painting after being ill, I put a lot of brown paint in a place where, on reflection, it does not belong. Whether I can bring this painting back to where I hoped it would be, turn it into something entirely new, or trash it, is yet to be determined. What did I learn? When speaking a simple, declarative sentence is unmanageable, I should stay away from paint brushes.

Who is the SpokesArtist?

I am the SpokesArtist for my own art enterprises, each of which is dedicated to making people smile. I have no idea how artists who pour their angst onto their canvases think about liking their own work.