If you’re looking for a perfect artist, you’ve come to the wrong place!

NOTE:  This blog entry first appeared on my old website on March 30, 2016 (a month before I became a CZT).  2400 tiles later, it still rings true today. 

There are lots of websites filled with fabulous art by highly qualified and professional artists. I love them, and I visit them regularly for inspiration, ideas, and simply to enjoy seeing what other people create.

But this website is about mucking about, remembering how to have fun, and being fearless in creating, removing the judgement of what is “good art” or “bad art” or whether someone is “better at it”. Because we all deserve to create art regardless of what other people (or we ourselves) think of it. So that means I am going to commit to showing you a variety of work I’m doing – the stuff I’m really proud of and the stuff that didn’t quite work out the way I might have hoped. It’s important that you get to see the warts as well as the roses, because it’s important to know that it’s okay to create work that isn’t perfect.

Artists will tell you this is something they learn to deal with. They will tell you about the Inner Critic who is constantly reminding you that this “isn’t good enough”; that it doesn’t measure up to someone else’s benchmark. One of the great things about Zentangle is that it helps many of us move through this barrier, and once that happens we can look at the work of other people with an objective eye. Instead of bemoaning, “I could never make something that good” we can study it. “How did they achieve that effect? What would happen if I tried that? What would my version look like?” Out of that comes the realization that our work will never look like someone else’s and that’s the whole point. We each have our own style, and that means nobody else’s work will look like ours, either. And that means you actually are an artist!

The tile shown is my very second one, done Jan 12, 2015