Confronting the conflict!

A truth about the battle in any creative project

May 22, 2025

First off, I’d love to invite you to my Creative Mornings Paris talk on Friday, May 23rd at 8am. If you’re a fan of my newsletter, come see me recount my many creative tales IRL, including how starting standup comedy at 37 has profoundly revived my creative practice. It’s free and a guaranteed good time.

Dear reader,

I’ve been trying to film myself painting a giant watercolor with very little success. There’s no suspense! There are no lightening bolts! Maybe the sleepy Parisian sun will come out from time to time to grace it with a fleeting ounce of drama. But as far as the social media storytelling behind a painting, there are really just a ton of podcasts and my own internal monologue animating the process at any given moment. Some reoccuring thoughts include (and for the record, they aren’t nice!) “this sucks!” “this is just like other things you’ve done already” “this isn’t real painting” “this is not good instagram”.

Defeated after a frustrating studio day, I had coffee with fellow watercolor illustrator Claire Morel Fatio last week and I had to ask “what do you do when you’re just not getting what you want?” Claire mentioned that every painting is a conflict. You have the embrace the act of pushing through, shutting down your inner sabateur and pulling yourself out the other end. Unless you can look at a “finished” painting, you can’t decide if what you’ve done is good or bad. The truth is the act of working through it is the only way to generate a solution.

This conflict is defintely the reason why a lot of young artists just give up. It’s too frustrating to waste time and too risky relying on your technique without knowing what the final piece will look like.

Here are a few pragmatic takeaways when you feel like you’re in that state of creative flight or flight.

Sketch out what you plan to do ahead of time. Test out all the variables before you put paint to paper (color, composition, concept). The more undecided information you leave to the last minute, the more pressure you put on yourself to nail it on the first try.
Focus on the process and getting lost in it. The power of how X is one of few things can shut off your brain is worth it in itself.
Set yourself up for success. The only way to improve sometimes is to lower your expectations (think: I just started painting. I’m not here to make a masterpiece) and give yourself restrictions (think: painting the same thing 10 minutes a day).
Take a break. If you’re depleted, nothing will look good. Take a walk around the block, call a friend, drink some water. Come back with fresh eyes and see how your perspective shifts.
Accept the truth. Listen, some days are just no good. Art is inherently wasteful and it hurts. Even if you hate what you’ve painted, identify at least 1 thing that’s effective about it. And ask yourself how you can impliment that to the next painting.

Voila, dear reader. Stay inspired and don’t drink the watercolor water. -jkw

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