You are listening to the Savvy Painter Podcast episode number 260.

Hello savvy painters. Today I want to talk about a few things we do when we don't have full

confidence in the work we create or in ourselves the artist who

creates it and the reason I want to talk about this is because I see a lot of artists who

don't trust themselves they're not trusting their voice and sometimes

they're not even aware that they have one. They're not trusting their own

abilities and sometimes the way that this shows up is really subtle or it seems like a good thing to do but it

ends up creating a feeling of helplessness and inadequacy. So I think it's really

important to notice and I want to challenge you to think about these issues a little bit differently so that you are empowered to create.

So the first thing is we delegate the responsibility of our

creative vision to someone or something else because we don't have confidence in

our own capacity to figure things out. Sometimes we have an idea for a painting or a series of paintings

or maybe we have an idea for a big audacious project. Years ago when I first moved to Argentina I had an idea for a huge

project. I wanted to paint my way around the country to visit all of Argentina's 23

provinces and to paint from my experiences there.

And it seemed crazy at first.

But bit by bit, kind of like filling in a puzzle, I figured it out. I didn't have all the answers. In fact I had

no clue what I was going to do or how I would pull this thing off. I just knew that I wanted to do it and that I believed that I could figure it out.

Ann Lamont wrote this beautifully in her book, Bird by Bird.

And it's been a long time since I've read this book, so I'm paraphrasing this, I'm going completely off my memory, but the title comes from something that her father said to her brother when he was really panicked about a book report that was

due the next day for school.

And the report was on something like Western birds or something like that.

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