I’ve been reading an incredible book about feedback, how to give it better, but more importantly, how to get better at receiving.
If art is anything, it’s a lesson in receiving feedback. Anyone who makes anything will always find a willing audience to pass judgement. But, it’s sometimes difficult to turn the positive and negative critique into something you can use. This is where the ACE model of Feedback, described by Sheila Keen in her book, Thanks for the Feedback, comes in handy. This journal entry is a concise summary, and if you’re interested to find out more, I highly recommend reading the book. It’ll help you in work and in personal relationships, too.
Appreciation feedback
“I notice you. I get you. You matter.”
We all need appreciation from people. The weight on which we stake the opinions of others about ourselves is phenomenal. Just look at the problematic phenomenon of our ‘like’ and ‘follow’ culture on social media. We interpret every new like or follow as ‘appreciation’ feedback. Like it or not, we want to know that we matter, that people are seeing us.
Ignoring social media, as an artist, appreciation-style feedback comes in all sorts of ways. Being asked to do a new project or book by a publisher must mean you’re doing something right. Having a gallery agree to display your work or, a passing comment from a stranger on Instagram that says, “Nice work!”. It all comes back to satisfying that basic human need for acceptance. Knowing when you’re appreciated (and not appreciated) is important. It stokes our fires to produce better work. However, it’s often hard to remember to celebrate the appreciation in the face of the other types of feedback, coaching and evaluation.
Coaching (and Evaluation) feedback
“Here’s how you can improve.”
Ah, advice. Is there any artist reading this who hasn’t heard some coaching advice. It usually goes something like, “I love what you’re doing, but if you just did X, you’d sell a lot more.” Or, “What if you tried using a more limited colour palette. It would look more refined.”
Yikes. Coaching is a slippery slope. Part of the problem with Coaching is that there’s always an ‘Evaluation’ element implicit in the advice on how to improve. Someone has seen something (your finances, your art practice, your studio setup), evaluated against something else (how much art other people in your category are selling, the way another artist works, the studio of some other artist), and, instead of just describing their understanding of the two approaches against an objective, fixed criteria, they jump into being helpful with some ‘coaching.’ Ways you or your work could be more like the other thing.
The important thing for an artist when they receive some ‘coaching’ advice, is to pull out some more detail from the giver so you can contextualise the coaching. For example, if someone says, “You should make the character’s head bigger on page 4, 6 and 7.” You can ask why. Is it because they think the character’s head is too small on these pages in comparison to the other pages? Or, is it what they really want to see is more detail on those pages and they think that the solution would be to make it bigger? Humans are wonderful at offering solutions, but often, trying to understand ‘why’ the solution is offered is a big part of uncovering what the real problem is.
With coaching feedback, I find it most helpful to understand what they’re evaluating you against first, as an objective measure, which can then start the next part of the conversation; what you can do about it. It may be to follow the coaching advice you got, but often, there’s a different solution or the ‘coaching’ is really covering up some other issue.
Evaluation feedback
“Here’s where you stand, and what to expect.”
The best evaluators can articulate two things. An objective assessment of your work against fixed criteria, and, the likely outcomes that will result if that work does not improve in some way.
Take, for example, a folio evaluation. An example of fixed criteria could be that to be a working book illustrator, you need to do the following:
- Be able to draw the same character, consistently, from different angles and in different situations.
- Be able to create characters that display the full range of human emotions (Anger, Disgust, Fear, Joy, Sadness and Surprise) whether they’re animals or humans.
With the criteria stated, you (or your folio reviewer) can then objectively assess your work against it and have better conversations about where you’re achieving, and where you’re falling short.
So often, the criteria by which you’re judged is fuzzy. It’s in your power to clarify it. Ask questions. Once you know the criteria, and are clear on how you’re meeting or not meeting the requirement, it becomes far less emotionally confronting, less vacuous and you’re better equipped to work out how to improve. More importantly, the process of feedback becomes a positive experience for both giver and receiver. In the end, that’s really what’s standing in our way as we’re all trying to be the best artist we can be.