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Collage detail, September 2019

 
It just dawned on me. I need to make more art if I want to make good art.

 
Well, duh. I’ve read these words or words like them hundreds of times over the last decade. But this week, it actually sunk in. Make more art…suspend judgement…just do it.  So I am. Right now I’m making collages, something I know nothing about. Still, I expect what I make to be good, if not great. And that’s the problem: absurdly high expectations.

 
I see this in my students, as well as myself. They expect their work to be at the same level as mine, although I’ve been art journaling for years and they’ve spent a few hours. (I should know better, but I do exactly the same thing when I’m taking a class.)  The result: we wind up making nothing at all.

  
It’s time to stop wasting time and do something different. The best advice I have to offer comes from William Stafford in You Must Revise Your Life.  “Lower your standards.”

  
Lower our standards? What a radical concept! Let’s do it—today—and see what happens.