Almost every artist deals with a low sense of self-worth at some point.

One time as I was teaching, something really cool happened. I found myself in the midst of an impassioned speech with every single student’s face turned towards me, listening intently, artwork forgotten on the tables beneath their hands.

I was in my last class of the year, with teenage students, many who were graduating and had been in the program for several years. They were talking about their work, and about being an artist. They wondered about their future. They especially wondered, and were stressed about, the grades their work would recieve in the AP art program.

Then someone said something about the fear. The fear that every artist has, about their work being rejected and it feeling like they are personally being rejected too. I reacted to this strongly. I hate this fear and want to tell artists that their work has nothing to do with their personal worth.

It’s not an easy fix.

So I don’t know how I suddenly put it all together but it came out pretty well. I’d like to share it with you.

First I explained that even the best judge will always make decisions based on completely arbitrary things; ie, when she was a little girl and got sick, the room was pink, and now she reacts so negatively to pink that she doesn’t understand why anyone would use it. That’s a simple example, but a lifetime of experience will create an enormous amount of filters that a judge will see your work through. Art is subjective. You don’t get points for your distance or the height you jump. You only get points when you match the likes and dislikes of the judges. Whom you don’t know at all.

I had a flash of inspiration. I made everyone get a clean sheet of paper. I said, “this is your art surface”.

Is the paper less valuable after this? Not really. It had almost no value at all before, when it was blank; and certainly zero artistic value.

If you make something amazing though, then that is the value you have added to the paper. Your work is the only value there. The paper is only the carrier of that value.

You cannot take value away from the paper. You cannot make negative value artistic value. In fact, you cannot even create low artistic value. Every single thing you create has enormous value, whether you keep it or not.

Say you create something awful and you throw it away. But wait! Now you’ve added to your own personal learning. You know more than you did about how to make art decisions, and that is essential value that will be stored in your experience. That stored value will then come forth as MORE value when what you learned is applied over and over again, to the countless artworks you will create in the future.

When looked at this way, when you make something that you have “only” learned from, but do not want to keep or show, you create more value than if you made something great.

Woah. That’s the point. If you learn from a bad work, then you get something that applies to the rest of your life’s work.

But what you put on that paper, even if it is awesome, has no value at all when compared with the enormous value of you as a person. It’s like comparing the blank paper with the best artwork you’ll ever create. Your relationships: your caring; your loving; your hopes and dreams; these are what you are. Your value is you, and you are amazing.

You are you. Not your work.

Your work, however, will always be full of value; some of it amazing, and some of it not so much. Some of it you’ll be proud of, and some of it won’t be proud of at all – but you’ll learn something you apply to the rest of your life’s work.

Such value in both situations!

So do not make the mistake of looking at your learner, and thinking that it means you are less valuable than your were. Do not think that it means you ruined something. No, you have brought more creativity and knowledge into the universe.

You do that every time you make something. You can only add to the universe. You cannot make a mistake when you create.