How to Love Your Own Paintings

Blue Skies
Acrylic on Canvas Panel
 10 x 8 in/25.4 x 20.3 cm
Copyright Byrne Smith 2015

If the headline of today's blog sounds a little narcissistic to you, that's OK. That's what loving yourself is about.

Confidence in your abilities and a little chutzpah not only is a good thing, it's really important to your painting life and to staying motivated to achieve even better work.

In that context here are a few pointers on how to love your own paintings:

- If you don't like your current direction, methods, palette, medium, etc.--change one or more today to whatever does make you happy.

- Throw away every painting you've completed, but don't like, and still have in your studio; they're not going to change and will only remind you of your perceived "failure(s)."

- Paint what you're good at painting; if you paint clouds (or cats or whatever) well, then paint a lot of those--how well you painted them will be a confidence-builder and will make you happy.

- Imitation is the nicest compliment, so find several painters whose work you really, really admire and find out as much as you can about their methods; this will help your own work in all kinds of ways and give you something to aspire to.

- Finally, be the best painter person you can be--be kind, be sharing, be open-minded, be forthright, be reasonable, keep learning, and maintain a world-view for the arts.

(Just one caveat: loving your work, if taken to the extreme, is not advised as other painter people will not like you and will call you names.)

But other than that, learn to love your own paintings and embrace the painting life.