The Beautiful Mystery of the Creative Struggle
It has been a thoughtful week, much like the ones before it.
Yesterday, I finished a painting I’ve been working on for the past couple of weeks. To celebrate, I decided to take a day off to write about the process and share a few thoughts that have been crossing my mind.
During the creation of this piece, I hit several walls where I simply didn’t know which direction to take. I had to gather my courage, try whatever felt right, and inevitably get stuck again. This back-and-forth cycle lasted for days. For someone with an obsessive personality like mine, this state of limbo is deeply unpleasant. It consumes me—disrupting my sleep, waking me up in the middle of the night just to stare at the canvas and try to figure out what is wrong. It completely dictates my mood and my existence. If you are a creative reading this, you probably relate.
After nearly 30 years of doing this, I know the feeling well. I’ve learned to sit with it, accepting that a piece might never come together. Sometimes a painting has to be trashed. When that happens, you lose time and expensive materials, but the worst part is the crushing frustration and sense of failure. It is tied deeply to the search for identity that most artists carry in their DNA.
This got me thinking about those "in-between" moments and how vital they are to the process. I’ve had periods where everything went smoothly, where I made safe, minor adjustments without taking any risks. Everything felt perfect for a while, but a sense of disconnection would grow day by day. Eventually, I’d wake up and ask myself: Why am I doing this? It just felt like routine commercial work.
So, let’s celebrate the struggle. Let's embrace the creative force that makes you fight, figure things out, and overcome your fears—including those inner voices telling you to give up.
The most beautiful part? If you asked me exactly how I painted this piece, I couldn't tell you. I couldn't reproduce it if I tried. That is what makes a painting truly special. Even to me, the person who created it, it remains a mystery.
