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| Drawing of Woman's Head, Leonardo da Vinci |
"If you're not getting a rejection a day you're not trying hard enough."*
Rejection is a built-in feature of an artist's life. You get used to it. Constructive criticism can be negative, which can be good for you. In art school, constant critiques from your teachers give you a thicker skin, which you need to survive in the art world. Critiques also teach you how to be a good critic of your own work. Accurate self criticism has to be learned. You have to learn to look at your own work with a cool, analytical mind, seeing it for exactly what it is. "He only moves toward the perfection of his art whose criticism surpasses his achievement," said Leonardo da Vinci. "An artist who lacks the power of self-criticism accomplishes but little. It is good if your work stands higher than your own opinion of it; bad if it is on the same level. But it is a great disaster if your work stands lower than your judgment of it."
A blast of negative criticism can be the best thing that ever happened to you if you learn from it, saving yourself years of wandering around lost in the artistic desert. "Nothing is more apt to deceive us than our own judgment of our work. We derive more benefit from having our faults pointed out by our enemies than from hearing the opinions of friends," said Leonardo. It's important to take criticism as valuable information you wouldn't otherwise have. Humanity's capacity for self deception is apparently infinite. It's important not to take criticism as a personal attack, but as potentially helpful advice, a tool against self deception.
Nobody wins everything. At whatever level you're working, there's room for growth and development, and therefore, the possibility of failure and rejection. To move forward as an artist, you have to continually apply to shows, grants, prizes, residencies, and commissions, etc., and you can't win them all. But you have to apply, anyway. You can't win if you don't enter. And who knows - sometimes the rejection du jour will turn out to be a win instead. Which is in fact what just happened to me. Yesterday, I got an email from a show I entered, read the first line before opening it, "Thank you for submitting your work..." and assumed it was a rejection. The acceptance letters almost always start, "Congratulations! Your work has been accepted..." But I opened it and Eureka! An acceptance email that started out like a rejection email! An anomaly. They want my work, but they want more info and clearer photos. I can live with that!
*not Leonardo da Vinci.
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