The Art & Poetry of Mary Coleman

I’m not a big fan of this drawing, but I need to do a drawing a day, and this was day 9’s drawing, so my Inktober goal was completed. That’s what’s important, that I sat down and drew. Never mind if it was a bit of a failure, I learned from it and I will pick up my pen tomorrow and try something new. So far I am ahead of schedule which is good because there are a few days coming up where I won’t have time to draw.

I don’t like this prompt. It’s taken a long time, but I recently overcame perfectionism and one of my biggest hangups was a fear of failure. It prevented me from doing visual art the way I wanted because I didn’t even want to try, my expectations were so impossible. I could never live up to them and I couldn’t tolerate the failure that inevitably happened when I tried. It took a lot of work in therapy to beat this. Years of work. I have learned failure is an integral part of learning and growing and we need it as much as we need success. There is no achievement without some failure along the way.