We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Ian Bristow. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Ian below.
Ian, first a big thank you for taking the time to share your thoughts and insights with us today. I’m sure many of our readers will benefit from your wisdom, and one of the areas where we think your insight might be most helpful is related to imposter syndrome. Imposter syndrome is holding so many people back from reaching their true and highest potential and so we’d love to hear about your journey and how you overcame imposter syndrome.
Imposter syndrome is a feeling I’m not sure any artist who actively chases self improvement can (or should) ever overcome. Understanding the drive born of forever looking up at our artistic heroes and seeing our work falls short is at the core of a well maintained effort to push oneself to new heights. The problem arises when one forgets that their heroes also suffer from it, just as we do. Not one artist who’s remotely humble ever thinks their work is good enough. Which leads me to how I learned to accept my imposter syndrome and use it to fuel my own growth. I simply watched interviews with great artists. I studied the humans behind the art, not the artwork itself. It wasn’t long before I felt like I belonged. These are my people. These are the ones who know exactly how I feel. They have the same fears I do, the same critics I do, and many of the same heroes too. To all who might be feeling the burden of imposter syndrome as they read this, just know that you are not alone, there’s nothing wrong with you. Your work is better today than it was yesterday, and it will be better tomorrow than it was today. Keep learning and working hard, and never forget to look back at your old work for a confidence booster.
Thanks for sharing that. So, before we get any further into our conversation, can you tell our readers a bit about yourself and what you’re working on?
As a student of the arts, I tend to spread my efforts between several disciplines, namely art/design, writing and music. Music is something I do for me, while the artwork and writing are more monetarily fueled. My freelance art and design work tends to come in waves, so I write in the downtime. All three artforms excite me for different reasons but remain universally special in that they are based on acts of creativity. The act of taking a seed of thought from an idea I had mulled around in my head to something with the potential to impact others never ceases to amaze and inspire me.
In this last year my artistic focus has largely been in studying design as well as works produced by the Dutch Masters, which I feel has pushed my book covers to a new level of quality, both illustratively and compositionally.
There is so much advice out there about all the different skills and qualities folks need to develop in order to succeed in today’s highly competitive environment and often it can feel overwhelming. So, if we had to break it down to just the three that matter most, which three skills or qualities would you focus on?
Three qualities I hold above all others in my artistic journey, in no particular order, would be patience, persistence and humility.
Patience is far more important than I had once assumed it to be, most notably the patience to work a painting beyond the first, second or even third threshold. This is an issue I believe many artists face. The first time they see the painting might be done, they call it done and move on. But the best works are cared for by the artist long after the average viewer would easily assume it’s finished. Attention to detail really adds up across the piece. Also, the patience to grow as an artist at a reasonable speed. Don’t look at the growth of others online and compare yourself. We’re all individuals.
Persistence is essential in getting beyond the aforementioned imposter syndrome, among other things. No matter how many times we fail, we must get back up and try again. Imagine the artist is a fighter, and each bad drawing is a punch, we will take punches all our lives, lots of them. It’s critical that we get up, shrug it off and keep fighting. Along the way we land a fair few of our own blows, each time we produce a piece we can find something good about.
Humility comes into play as our skills begin to make a splash in the art community or with family/friends/clients, etc. Plenty of folks are going to begin praising your work as you gain in skill. While it’s genuinely wonderful to feel such recognition, beware. Those who praise your work don’t understand the journey. They don’t see the summit you’re climbing to or recognize that you’ve really just reached a particular checkpoint before yet another grueling climb. Take the praise, put it away in your rainy day coffer and pull it out when you’re feeling down about your work.
Before we go, any advice you can share with people who are feeling overwhelmed?
Feeling overwhelmed is a relatively normal space as a working artist, so it’s important to have ready-made strategies to deal with that before one shuts down entirely. I tend to avoid overworking to ‘get ahead of things’, as all that tends to achieve is a bout of burnout. This essentially evens things out in the end but leaves me feeling depressed about the time off I took to recover and overworked in the meantime.
Balance your time and don’t forget to live a little. Have a favorite game? Play it at night. Have a favorite place to go eat, clock off and go eat. Find that steady rhythm between work and play so you can produce at your highest and most consistent level. Do the things that feed your imagination and keep the well of inspiration full.
Lastly, take the work on in bite-sized chunks. Break it up into pieces which are reasonable to get done in a day’s work and then allow yourself to feel that sense of accomplishment for finishing something each day. Because big projects are accomplished one small act at a time.
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