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Powers and Pitfalls of Potential Blog:
Picture a stark white canvas hanging on a wall, absent of color and waiting to be painted. Now picture that wall it’s on, covered in a messy drop cloth with endless paint marks of colorful incongruity.
A new painting is there to be made where many more have been created before it. If you’re an artist, this is an image you’ve no doubt seen countless times without a second thought. For me, seeing it is always an emotional experience. I can’t help but think of potential when I see a clean canvas on a paint-smeared wall; the piece could become my best work to date or it could land among a pile of incompletes destined to be painted over. Most likely it will exist somewhere in between. I’ve learned to find comfort in that range of outcomes that potential presents.
What makes this emotional for me is knowing that I wasn’t always comfortable with achieving anything less than my full potential. In fact, the idea of not reaching the artistic goals I felt capable of nearly kept me from pursuing painting at all.
I didn’t paint for a year and a half after college, mostly because I was scared that the end result would be disappointing. I let the shiny, bright light of potential (in my case, a career that would live up to the four years of effort I put into an art degree) cause me to sit in fear when it was finally time to realize that potential.
I knew I could make good art, so the thought of producing subpar art when I was rusty and working outside of the college art community I had thrived in was too much to handle.
On the handful of times I did pull out my paints and begin to make marks on a canvas, almost instantly I became anxious because it was inevitably falling short of the potential I had in my head. It became a self-fulfilling loop– I didn’t want to paint because I wasn’t immediately hitting my potential and I wasn’t going to reach my potential because I didn’t want to paint.
It was only in January 2016, when I told myself to prioritize making “something”-- to put anything down on paper– that I realized that the attempt was more valuable to me than the perfect potential I had in my head. I started small with doodles and sketches which basically no one saw, and they weren’t even really that good. But it was something, and from that starting point the potential to reach another rung on the ladder seemed obtainable.
We are a culture obsessed with potential. The idea of the shiny new thing (invention, politician, idea, painting etc.) that will come in and save the day. This way of thinking can make it particularly hard for artists because the truth is, potential, when it’s in our head, is absolutely perfect.
It’s a dream career where everything falls into place and where all of our paintings synthesize exactly what’s in our heart and help us fulfill all of our wildest dreams. This can be great— we want to optimistically believe that everyone has potential—but it can be harmful just the same. My experience showed me that the scariest thing isn’t trying and falling short of that dream, it’s not trying at all. So I made myself a de facto New Year’s resolution that I was going to destroy my idealized version of potential and allow myself to mess up and move on.
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