"If we wait until we're ready..."

I hit the mid-life mark recently, and that got me questioning (yikes, such a cliché) what sort of things I want to focus on in the days, months and years ahead.

Longer ago than I care to think about I had a couple of small showings of my original drawings and paintings. The first show was in Victoria BC at my house mostly for friends and family; it went well. The second held in a popular cafe was a sell-out success.

I continue to be amazed by that one.

In spite of the success of those shows, selling my original artwork and prints was a road I chose not to go down. And then I read something that has stuck with me, "If we wait until we're ready then we'll be waiting for the rest of our lives."

There's a lot of wisdom in that statement.

So I've been working on some new drawings and taking a second look at some older ones. I'm poking at the idea of selling my artwork locally at a makers market. It's something I've always wanted to try.

This past December I worked with one of my good friends at the One of a Kind Show in Toronto and gained some valuable first-hand experience at Canada's largest makers market in the process. If you're like me, you learn by doing, and you appreciate the unexpected knowledge that comes from those experiences. And because I'd like to sell my work at maker markets in Canada, it was helpful to put in some time at the biggest show in the country. It gave me a sense of what I could achieve with a lot of hard work and creativity.

There will be (are) challenges.

A person can come up with all sorts of excuses for not doing something. Tired, broke, lost in a sea of social activities or maybe Netflix has finally taken over your life. For me and I'm sure plenty of others, I've learned that crippling self-doubt reigns supreme on the list of reason not to create something. But something else I've learned over the years is that the work can always be better or different or something else entirely. We develop by doing, and it's the doing that generates the work.

I've never once finished a drawing, looked at it, and thought it's perfect. It won't be. It doesn't happen that way. But I've always believed there's perfection in the imperfection. It's the creativity that matters.

"If we wait until we're ready then we'll be waiting for the rest of our lives."