It may be hard to believe, but criticisms can be used in improving your art. Whatever field you’re in, there will always be a time that you’ll get negative feedbacks from people. If you’re a budding artist, expect that it’s not always praises that you’ll receive, but not so good comments too. You might be wondering how you should handle these types of situations.
Keep Your Calm
Whether you like it or not, you’ll get these negative feedbacks throughout your career. There are many reasons why people might give you these bad comments. But whatever their reasons are, it’s understandable if you’ll feel hurt. After all, you’ve put your heart and soul in your work. You may want to respond to these comments with anger; but don’t. Calm yourself and deal with it professionally. Remember, even long term artists still get bad comments every now and then.
Responding negatively to these types of comments would just make the matter worse. Moreover, you could miss the opportunity to actually learn from these feedbacks, especially if they come from professional art critiques, art enthusiasts and the experts in the industry. So don’t write or say anything without thinking about it thoroughly. You’ll not be able to think clearly if you don’t calm your emotions down.
Determine Who’s Giving the Feedback
People would always have something to say; and it could be something good or bad. It’s important to know which comments matter and which don’t. You don’t always have to listen to them, since not all of them are meant to teach you something. There are people who make negative comments out of jealousy or just to bring someone down. These are the types of comments that you should ignore.
However, you can always learn something from feedbacks given by art experts and art buyers. Art experts who have been in the industry for so long can teach you things from their own experience. It’s also important to take the feedbacks of art buyers or collectors; since after all, they are your target clients.
View the Comment Objectively
This may be a difficult to thing to do since negative feedbacks pertaining to your art, would naturally affect you. However, if you try to set aside your personal emotions, and view the comments given to you objectively, you could get great lessons that would help improve your craft. Again, you should be able to tell which feedbacks would help you grow and which ones you just need to forget.
Learn from Them
Once you open your mind to the things that you could learn from these feedbacks, use them to your advantage to further improve your work. These constructive criticisms would help you greatly with your craft if you decide to make them as tools to help make you better. But remember that you can’t please everyone; especially each person has his own taste and preference when it comes to art.
This is why you should know which suggestions to take or not. You don’t have to listen to each of those comments and lose yourself in the process. It’s important that you stay true to your style, if this is what makes you happy. You wouldn’t enjoy doing art if you would think of every little detail that others tell you. Art is a form of expression. How will you be able to express yourself if you don’t listen to your own voice? Learn how to keep the balance so that the feedbacks you get would help enhance your work, but not change you into an artist that you are not.
Enhance Your Craft and Keep Working
Many artists lose their drive because of the criticisms they receive. Do not let the same thing happen to you. Be strong and keep doing what you love. Get whatever positive things that you can learn from these feedbacks and don’t dwell on those that would bring you down. Acknowledge the critiques that gave those comments and let them know that you’ll use them to do better with your craft. For haters who give negative comments to make you feel bad, you don’t have to answer them. Don’t waste your energy and time on these people, but instead, focus on improving your work and maybe start up your own art gallery one day.
Use constructive criticisms to improve your art. Don’t let negative comments stop you from doing amazing work. Keep enhancing your craft and enjoy doing what you love.
Photo Attribution:
Featured and 1st image by Tomascastelazo (Own work) [CC-BY-SA-3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0)], via Wikimedia Commons
