No one is coming to save you. Not a teacher, not a critic, not an agent, not a gallery, and not a stranger online who finally sees what you have been doing all along. No one is coming to tell you that the work is good, that you are allowed to try the large canvas, that it is time. You can wait for that visit for forty years. Many people do, and they call the waiting humility.
Here is what stands between you and a lifetime of waiting: your practice. That is the complete list. Every question you hope someone else will answer for you is answered at your easel or your desk, and nowhere else. Is it any good? Write twenty chapters and read them. Am I ready to show it? Show it and find out. Can I handle a life-size portrait? Paint it. The evidence may say no. That is still an answer, for now, and it tells you what to practice next. If you want to feel better about your art, reassurance is not a shortcut. The way is the work.
This is why practice is self-advocacy, and why self-advocacy is not arrogance. Arrogance is deciding you have arrived. Advocacy is showing up on your own behalf every day and doing the work whether or not anyone else thinks you should. Self-improvement assumes you are a problem to be fixed. Self-advocacy assumes you are a client worth representing. You are the only one who can take that job. The pay is terrible. Take it anyway.
The job does not end when you grow your team. If you are a writer who lands an agent, you had better keep thinking like an indie author. If you are a painter who gets into a big New York gallery, keep painting like you don’t have one. Agents change their minds. Galleries close. Editors are laid off three months before your book comes out. The artists who survive those events are the ones whose practice never depended on them. Being chosen is pleasant. Congratulations. It is not a plan.
Exercise: Write down one question about your work that you have been waiting for someone else to answer. Is this any good? Am I ready to publish it? Should I write a novel? Then design a week of practice that answers it. If the question is whether to go bigger, go bigger five times. You will love it, or you will have created a new curriculum for yourself. Either way, you now hold the only opinion that was ever going to matter.
Excerpted from the forthcoming anniversary edition of Be an Artist (or Just Live Like One), available next week. The first edition debuted as a No. 1 Amazon bestseller in Art Study and Teaching.