Is your art any good?

funky mixed media collage - Cynthia Berg 2022

How do you know if your art or writing is any good?

Sometimes when I invite someone to join me in an Insight Writing® workshop, they say, “Oh, thank you so much, but I’m not a very good writer.”

Maybe they think there’s a bunch of us getting together to debate the Oxford comma and diagram sentences while we drink wine and compliment each other’s iambic pentameter.

Yeah, um, no thanks. lol

It’s not easy to convince others that there’s no real bar for ‘good writing.’ Like all art, it’s completely subjective. In fact, the more striving for ‘good’ we do, the further away we get from creativity, flow and making something decidedly authentic or unique.

I suppose the only way I can know if my art (whether it's a painting, a photograph or a poem) is any good is if it elicits some kind of response - from myself, first, and other people. Even a negative response is better than indifference.

I can make art according to the instructions for 'good art' and end up with something not very interesting at all.

Or I can do all the 'wrong' things and end up surprised at how much everyone loves it and how enjoyable it was to make.

So maybe it doesn't matter whether or not something is 'good' as long as the experience of making it feels meaningful.

It might be helpful to drop back to the origins of our experience with art to remember what we really loved about it. Before we knew about the color wheel or the rule of thirds. Before “Don’t make a mess” and “Why waste time with that” and “You’ll never pay the bills.”

Drop back to a time when you painted with your fingers or wrote in a journal with a pink metallic gel pen and stickers. Drop back to Play-Doh or Legos or Lite Brite.

Chances are, we weren’t super concerned about whether our creations were good enough to sell or display in a gallery or become best sellers.

We showed up. We gathered what we had. We just began and kept going until we were done. And then stuck it up on the fridge for all to see.

You know, at my friend’s home, sometimes the artwork on the fridge is showstopping!

My suggestion here won’t be to ‘not worry about whether it’s good or not.’ I’m quite sure the ego will continue to worry, no matter what.

No, my suggestion here is this:

Decide it’s good. Sign it, frame it, share it, blog it or whatever your equivalent of ‘sticking it up on the fridge’ might be.

Decide it’s good. Call yourself an artist, a writer, a maker. Claim the title in your bio. Put it on your business card.

Simply, confidently, most assuredly, decide. It’s good.

Tell me - how do you know if your art is any good? Are you afraid to paint or write because you think you aren't 'good' at it yet?

Insight Writing® is a practice of allowing your creative unconscious energy to roam free on the page. It’s spontaneous, messy and vulnerable.  

To get beyond the head and into the heart and soul requires a kind of permission slip – permission to bypass cleverness and the inner editor, to write about what's really true and Say YES to the words that are coming instead of searching for a better story. 

The most enjoyable result of trusting this process of writing is learning something new about yourself and developing a healing sense of being fully expressed, a few things most of us lose touch with as we grow into serious adults.