The Sandwich method.
In the end maybe not as effective as they told.
I would like to learn a method.
The method that is there to ‘help’ the artist in question make their best work.
I wonder what my best work would be.
Is that work already in me? Is it ready to come out?
Yesterday I read my Natal Birth Chart. Again.
I do this once every now and then. Often in times with many bigger changes, as if searching for some fixed truth in fluid times. So yesterday I started reading to my mother: ‘let’s see who I really am’.
Some of the things stated were quite accurate, others really off beat (especially those saying I’m good with money).
But the one that comes back now, writing about reflections and ‘my best works’ is this:
‘At times, you can be intensely dissatisfied with your personal accomplishments and expressions of self. You put a lot of pressure on yourself regarding your own endeavors. You can be quite dissatisfied with your creative self-expressions, preferring to hide your expressions from others until you feel the output is perfectly ‘right’. This is largely due to a perceived inability to reveal your true personality to others.’
Even though it’s quite bluntly stated, there are some truths in these words. I can be dissatisfied with what I make and hide those until the output is perfectly ‘right’.
To give feedback with specific idea of helping the artist making their best work, creates somehow a different mindset: instead of ego-tripping (even if not done deliberately, really) and state all things that I’d have done differently or that are not my taste, it invites me to do the step to the other side and stand next to the artist. From there we can look at the artwork together and speculate, what does it need? Where does it ask for a bit more attention? Where can it still be refined? It invites me to rethink the vocabulary that I have when it comes to describing work, often based on opinion or feeling regarding the work. It thus helps to erase a little part of myself, that’s watching with some kind of scepticism, and be open to engage with the artwork of the other artist. I also notice describing helps me formulate, the things that I see and to create a vocabulary that is unloaded towards the work.
I’d like to take these new ways of approaching feedback and integrate it into the inner critic that is building a wall between my creative self and the feasible outcome into the material world. To go beyond the scepticism and trust what is there and that needs to be expressed.