How To Love Your Art

Lessons from Virginia Woolf on Artistic Confidence and Personal Growth

The following post is part of a Seed Pod collaboration about libraries. Seed Pods are a SmallStack community project designed to help smaller publications lift each other up by publishing and cross-promoting around a common theme. We’re helping each other plant the seeds for growth!

David Reading Proust. 2024

I’ve been working through some creative growing pains and taking time off from producing new art to allow for space for reflection. When immersed in creative work, there is a constant striving towards technical finesse and conceptual clarity. The further I clarify my message, the more that emerges from the deep well of my subconscious to be expressed. As my technical skill improves, I look back to previous work with a refined eye, more adept at scrutinizing its errors. The target is always moving, and I feel that I must, too. Yes—art is hard work—but it cannot be forced. Art is not born out of straining or overextending oneself. Art is work, but it will not reveal itself to you out of brute force, self-laceration, or any of our usual tactics we might use in other kinds of labor. Discipline is important in our creative practices, but more important is our ability to step back from the canvas and see how our smallest marks coalesce into the whole. The artist improves not merely through criticism, but also through self love. Let’s ask ourselves—how can I love my art right now? Just as it is?

The question of self worth as an artist must not be centered in creative output, nor in external validation. The first task of an artist is to find their center. To find it, one must filter out the perceptions of others, some of which the artist has unknowingly assumed as their own. If we center the visions of others in our own creative work, we are arguably not making art, but commerce.

I’ve been listening to Virginia Woolf’s diary on audiobook (for free on Audible!) while painting this week. I’ve listened all the way through the years of 1925 to 1933. In it, she divulges both her self-doubt and arrogance. She shares her thoughts on art and literature. Most importantly, her diaries illustrate both her self-criticism and how she dealt with others’ criticism of her work. I sensed a great change in her diary entries around the reception of her novel Mrs. Dalloway, to To the Lighthouse, and her 1928 novel Orlando: a Biography. She becomes successively more confident in her own creative vision. She becomes less concerned by external critique and more attuned to her own voice. At the debut of Mrs. Dalloway, she made careful note of reviews from critics, noting one which declared the novel “incoherent.” During her writing of Orlando, Woolf seems pleasantly surprised by how little she cared about how it would be received by the public.

Orlando is one of my favorite novels, and listening to Woolf’s diaries gives me more insight into why.

When she first conceived the concept of the book, she wrote in her diary:

“I feel the need of an escapade after these serious poetic experimental books whose form is always so closely considered. I want to kick up my heels and be off!”

This mirrors the state of my own creative practice as I sit here, painting digitally on my couch. I crave ease, playfulness and whimsy. I want to care less about the reception of my art and more about the transformation and personal growth that my art practice facilitates.

Last summer, I read Orlando last summer under my favorite willow tree by Lake Michigan. I had decided to give up on painting. I had decided that there were many masters of painting, and I wasn’t one of them. For a time, I resigned myself to my fate as an observer of art, but not an artist myself. I put away my paints for the summer, redirecting my energy towards literature.

And so I read Orlando, a novel that follows the 300 year life of an aspiring poet who spent half of it writing a poem called The Oak Tree. The protagonist writes the poem, re-writes it, then throws away the manuscript in his creative consternation. He gives up his life in an opulent mansion and joins a band of gypsies. He throws himself into the study of literature. He meets a critic who announces poetry dead. He then falls into a state of deep despair. He transforms into a woman. In the end, he discovers art as a form of survival, as a way of navigating through life and making sense of the human expierience. Orlando ultimately discovers that the critic’s perceptions of his art, the accolades, and prestige are not all that important in the end.

At the end of reading Orlando, I painted this pot of propagated Begonia sitting in my kitchen windowsill. I wanted to paint loosely, focused on atmosphere, color, mark making, and exaggerated color. I wanted to be liberated from the confines of realism. I knew intellectually that the art that I wanted to make was not a faithful replication of reality, and yet I still could not seem to let go of a vision of art that would be seen as conventionally “good.”

And so I sought critique from a Facebook group titled “Rude Artists’ Group—Only Criticism, NO NICE TALK!” I decided to let my art be seen through a hyper-critical lens, by Facebook users who held an extremely narrow view of what art is or should be. I posted my painting and received a wide range of criticism. Some critiques were surprisingly friendly, given the name. Other comments just read “no.” Many suggested that I “tighten up” or tone down my color palette. Ultimately, all of this input helped me to realize how little I care for the thoughts others had on my art. If I let the opinions of just anyone steer the direction of my work, then it wouldn’t really be my work, would it?

In writing about the creation of Orlando, Virginia Woolf describes her words as brush strokes, and her phrases as swaths of paint. She paints her subject, paints over it again, and carefully considers what parts of the underpainting she will allow to show through. This opacity and translucence is deeply felt throughout Orlando, revealing glimpses into her own creative liberation, as Orlando reaches the same self revelations found in her diary. She meticulously considers each new mark, and it’s relation to the whole. In some passages her mood is euphoric, and in the next, she laments her meandering prose, wishing to be rid of the book. Thanks to Virginia Woolf, Orlando, and the diaries she left behind, we can step back and see that this is all just apart of the great work.

Discuss in the comments!

1. What is your experience with critique on your work? Who’s thoughts on your work matter to you, and why?

2. What is a detail or element in your creative work that unexpectedly shed light on the broader themes or messages of your entire body of work?

3. What’s a book that’s fueled you creatively?

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