Standing In-Progress

"We live in a flawed world. Nothing you do will ever be perfect and you will always be in-progress in some portion of your life and that's okay."

I began painting when I was a child, but I never really considered it as anything more than a time waster until I was a senior in high school. I remember every year signing up for art as my extra circular activity in school, and every year I would receive my schedule at the beginning of the year, and I was always placed into music, p.e., computer and even Spanish one year. Being young and naive, I believed this was because other students who were more worthy than I were getting those placements and I surely would place into art once I was a senior and "top of the food chain." Well, senior year rolled around and I received my placement for the year, and lo and behold, I had been placed in horticulture, not art. My mom at this point had had enough and spoke to the principle about my schedule that year. Long story short, I then was placed in an art class, homeroom.

If any of you have ever taken an art class in high school, I'm sure we had a similar experience. I had an amazing teacher who was super under appreciated. We were assigned a new project every day and we were expected to finish said project before the period ended. And let's be honesty, how much can you scratch that creative bone when you are forced into this one hour project box? One day, late into the year, the teacher allowed us to create anything during homeroom, the only rule, we had to have it completed by end of the period to be graded. I searched the 'junk' room for something to do for my project that day. I found, to my delight, a few cheap old canvases that had previously been painted on and some old crusty acrylic paints. By the time the class ended, I had taught myself how to mix paints to achieve the color scheme I desired, how to blend colors to achieve a more intentional look and how to thin my paints to a more liquid consistency. By the end of homeroom, I turned in a painting of a sail boat floating on a lake during sunset with a mountainside peaking over the edges of the water. What the teacher said to me next, I believe, has changed my life forever. Mrs. Bentley came to my desk, graded my painting and said "Don't worry about doing the other projects, if you just want to paint every single day, just paint." So that's what I did.

So I painted every day in art class senior year. I then went on to college and I painted every single day while studying oil painting. And when I graduated college, I continued painting here and there. But, no matter how many years of experience I had, and no matter how many critiques I sat through, one thing never changed, I was terrified of someone judging me while my painting was still in progress. To say I went to extreme measures to make sure no one ever saw my paintings in progress was an understatement. I would finish my painting at home instead of utilizing my studio time, I would hide myself in a corner of the room as to give off the 'unfriendly' impression and I even went as far as to push friendships away just so they would never see my art in an unfinished state.

As I built my business, I began to see these traits rear their ugly little heads again. As we began renovating our building, I found myself struggling to post videos of the 'in progress' portions of our building. When people would ask me how the renovation was coming I'd become defensive and give a less than vague answer. After we finished and officially opened, when asked about some of the "rougher" portions of our renovation, such as the rough original hardwood we restored to the best of our ability, I would make excuses. "Oh well, we will probably go back and work on it more later so don't judge me." Guys, Trent, myself and some good friends spent many nights and hours sitting on that floor scraping the carpet glue that had been there for many years breaking our backs and hurting our hands, we are NEVER doing anything else to those floors. As a person who has had branding hammered into her head throughout her years at advertising school, I can't stand anyone seeing my work in less than perfect conditions. Here is the hard truth. We live in a flawed world. Nothing you do will ever be perfect and you will always be in-progress in some portion of your life and that's okay. Building a brand from the ground up is hard, renovating a building is hard, painting a picture is hard, and being perfect is impossible.

For the new year I am making one resolution. I will no longer make excuses for my in progress. I will no longer hide my work in the corner to only be seen when finished. I will stand in my in-progress no matter what part of life it is and be happy with what I have achieved and accomplished thus far. Here's to always being an in-progress human.