The Inner Critic and the Ego Trap
One of the sharpest criticisms we experience from our “inner critic” is the failure to be “original.” Psychologically, this is often an ego-driven protection mechanism designed to shield us from external judgment. If you refuse to create because you cannot produce something “completely original,” you effectively eliminate the possibility of failure. As long as the work remains uncreated, it remains perfect and beyond reproach.
However, the pursuit of “pure” originality is a logical fallacy. In her seminal work, The Artist’s Way, Julia Cameron observes:
“It is the ego’s demand that our work be totally original—as if such a thing were possible. All work is influenced by other work. All people are influenced by other people. No man is an island and no piece of art is a continent unto itself.”
The Science of Personal Perspective
We are each a unique intersection of biology, environment, and experience. Even when two creators attempt to replicate the same subject using identical media, the results are never identical. This is often seen in art classrooms where students follow a teacher’s step-by-step instructions. Despite the uniform direction, each project emerges with a distinct “hand”—a slight variation in line weight, color mixing, or composition. This “unintentional variance” is where your personal style begins to take root.
The Pedagogy of the Past: Learning by Copying
It is particularly devastating to hit a creative block early in your journey. To reach intermediate and advanced levels, one must first navigate the “beginner” phase. If you demand total originality from the start, you bypass the very tools needed to develop a unique voice.
The Master-Apprentice Tradition
The art world has a long, prestigious history of copying as a primary learning method. During the Renaissance and through the 19th-century academic tradition, “The Master Copy” was the standard of excellence.
- The Louvre: For over two centuries, the Louvre in Paris has allowed artists to set up easels to copy masterpieces. Greats like Paul Cézanne and Edgar Degas spent countless hours copying the works of Titian and Michelangelo to understand the “architecture” of a painting.
- The Goal: By copying, the artist “reverse-engineers” the Master’s decisions, learning how to handle light, shadow, and anatomy before attempting to invent their own.
Crafts as a Teachable Tradition
For those who did not receive formal art training in childhood, the world of crafts offers a vital “teachable tradition.” Crafts are often structured around patterns and step-by-step instructions. This structure isn’t a cage; it is a scaffold that allows the artist to build muscle memory and technical proficiency without the paralysis of “the blank canvas.”
The Path to Autonomy: Making It Your Own
The progression from “copying” to “originality” is not a jump, but a slow, natural evolution.
1. Faithful Reproduction
In the beginning, you will reproduce the work of instructors or patterns from magazines. This builds creative stamina and confidence. You are proving to yourself that you can complete a project from start to finish.
2. The Iterative Shift
Over time, your intuition will begin to suggest “micro-changes.”
- “This would look better in pink instead of yellow.” * “If I outlined this in black, it would have better definition.”
- “What if I used a different texture here?”
These small rebellions against the pattern are the birth of your artistic identity. You are moving from imitation to interpretation. You begin to discover your “aesthetic DNA”—the specific colors, shapes, and themes that resonate with you.
3. The Emergence of Style
Eventually, you will find you no longer need the full pattern. You might use a photo as a reference for a Great Dane’s anatomy, but you choose the lighting, the color palette, and the mood yourself. This is the transition to true originality: using the world as your reference, but your soul as the filter.
Building Confidence Through Practice
Confidence is the byproduct of experience. Consider the day in kindergarten when you first held a pencil. It felt huge, unwieldy, and difficult to control. Your teacher asked you to copy letters—forms that seemed impossible to recreate. Yet, through years of repetition, that pencil became an extension of your own arm.
Art requires the same period of “ungainly” growth. As Julia Cameron writes:
“Be willing to paint or write badly while your ego yelps resistance. Your bad writing may be the syntactical breakdown necessary for a shift in your style. Your lousy painting may be pointing you in a new direction. Art needs time to incubate, to sprawl a little, to be ungainly and misshapen and finally emerge as itself.”
Resources for Further Exploration
- “Steal Like an Artist” by Austin Kleon: A modern manifesto on how nothing is original and how to embrace influence.
- The Concept of “Transliteration” in Art: Researching how artists translate 3D life into 2D forms through copying.
- The Artist’s Way Morning Pages: A tool specifically designed to silence the “inner critic” mentioned in the introduction.
Final Thought
Originality is not the absence of influence; it is the presence of your unique perspective applied to those influences. Give yourself permission to be a student, to copy, and to “paint badly” until your own voice becomes the loudest one in the room.