The Value of Walking Away
…not from this website. Don’t worry. I’m talking about the value of walking away from an art project.
The sunk cost fallacy applies to art… more than I’ve ever wanted to let it because I am absolutely a completionist. If I start a project, I want nothing more than to check another “completed” box.
The troubles arise when the project is either larger than expected, or I lose interest part of the way through. Luckily, I have a couple examples I overcame the “larger than expected” issue:
I started a mural on my bedroom wall in July of 2023 after around a month trying to figure out the best design for it. I’m glad I waited for the right idea because I love how it turned out… but it was a much larger project than expected. It’s worth noting that, before the mural (and the 100 head project) the only project that took me more than a day or two was the 64 cube pixel art I made in a little under a week. (School projects don’t count because of the divided opportunities to work on them). Suddenly, I had a project that was starting to last months, and I didn’t know how to react. Every time I looked at the unfinished wall, I felt a pit in my stomach, and a little voice tell me “Why haven’t you finished that yet?” which would often send me into a spiral of despair and self-doubt towards my success as a young artist (extreme, but true.)
I finished it… eventually. It took several pushes, but I’m happy now with the result. Every time I look at it, I can hardly remember the wall without it.
(Same with the 100 heads… which took a little less time since I was really excited to get them out into the world, and the “pushes” to get them done were more frequent.)
I finished those large projects, and now am able to take on some bigger projects with the assurance from their success. What I have also learned though is: that motivation for large works can’t be momentary.
I mean, these two projects weren’t started on a whim. There were months leading up to each of them where I wanted to do something like it, but hadn’t quite come up with what. The planning phases were robust, and spanned far more than a few days. (For the heads, I had even done a smaller distribution of a dozen or so in my school before thinking of the hundred travelling ones. And for the mural, I sat on the idea for weeks before deciding what I would paint.) And of course, I continued to complete smaller projects while these were looming in the background. Sticking to one piece is simply unrealistic. Artists can say they have “worked on this piece for six years” because it’s on-and-off work, not constant, every day for six years. They work on other things and live their life inbetween sessions.
All this to say I know now that: I can’t make stuff without consistent justification behind it. Here’s a different example:
I recently (a month or so ago) started another decently large project: Turning a plastic crate into a Thneed factory. I’ve been documenting it through my Instagram, and a few people really enjoy seeing progress. But that enjoyment isn’t enough for me to feel motivated towards the project. So now, every time I see it I (similarly to the 100 heads and Mural,) somehow shame myself for not working on it, and send myself down a spiral into which I don’t make any art. (NOT what we want.)
I’m at a point today where what I really want to do is draw what I’ve built so far, and then finalize a cool illustration. I don’t want to finish the large sculpture. This is my one life, so why waste time doing something I don’t want to, that I don’t have to?
I have all the justification I need to scrap hours of work to pursue something I want to do more.
