I painted 3 paintings yesterday, and when I look at them today, I can’t help but see they’re all terrible. But, they are less terrible than the ones I did the day before yesterday. And when I compare the ones I did the day before that to the ones I did 3 months before, or 6 months before, or 5 years before, I realise that the older the work, the worse it is. But using this logic, it also means that the work I’ve just done today, the work that, right now, I think is my best work, won’t be my best tomorrow.
Maybe feeling ashamed of old work is the point. If we don’t look back on our work and see the faults or feel embarrassed by them, then maybe we haven’t learned anything by doing that work. And really, in the end, isn’t that the whole point of this art journey – to learn with every attempt and apply those lessons to the next work? The treacherous and wonderful thing about it is that it’s an infinite game – we play to play, not to win, because tomorrow-Matt will always be a slightly better artist than yesterday’s one. All I have to do is keep making the work.