Shedding Old-Skin

"We need space in our creative endeavours,
just as much as we need space in our photographs"

Often, I feel too much emphasis is placed upon the creation of work. But I think as artists, our non-creative time is just as important. We need to understand and most importantly, respect that periods of inactivity are just as healthy as periods of activity are. They give us a much needed pause in our creative lives to reflect and grow.

Moonfall, Salar de Uyuni, Bolivia. Image © Bruce Percy

Creative drought is often viewed upon negatively. There is a fear that since we cannot find any inspiration to create, or cannot create at will, that perhaps the creative well is dry for good. Our thoughts go along the lines os 'I shall never be able to create anything ever again!'

I think we should look more positively at these periods of inactivity and recognise that as with any creative endeavour, there is always going to be an ebb and flow to what we do. A yin and yang. To create, we must have periods where we do not.

I see these moments of inactivity as a rest, a pause in the music of our creativity. But there is more than just this, I've often found these periods to be the precursor to some new growth in my artistry.  What I had thought may be the dwindling of my creative force, turned out to be the beginning of a new direction, or the reinforcement of a style in my work. The shedding of old skin.

If you are currently experiencing some creative drought - a bare patch in your creativity, I would suggest you accept it and let it ride itself out. Take your foot of the gas and wait.

Just as when we have a pressing issue that we do not have the answer to, I've often found that given some time away from it, the answer will come. As my dad has often said to me when I was trying too hard to get something to work: "best give it a rest for a while and when you do come back to it, you'll see it in a new light".

To label ourselves, may be limiting

This week I received an e-mail from a good friend of mine who at the age of 46 has discovered that she's got a talent for drawing and painting. She said that she had always assumed she was a musician and it's been a bit of a surprise to her to find out that she has this other talent for drawing and painting as well.

Blue Pond Shirogane, Hokkaido, Image © Bruce Percy 2015

The same thing is true of myself. For most of my early adult life, Music was everything to me. I played in bands, wrote music and worked with others at creating songs. I was so serious about what I did that I'd even been offered a publishing deal at one stage. I built a home studio to record all my music and if anyone had asked me up until the age of 33 how I would define myself, I would have said that I was a musician.

Until I reached burn out.

The interesting thing is that everyone else around me was always commenting on my photographs. "Bruce writes music, but you should really see his photographs". I took photography as a very incidental interest - I had owned a camera since the age of 22 and would make the occasional decent photo without really understanding how.

This was more a mind-set than anything to do with my true leanings. I had chosen to see myself as a musician and every other creative outlet was simply just for fun, and into that fun-category, I'd placed my photography.

Things keep changing, and I keep finding out new things about myself through my art.

Even though my friends could see that I had an aptitude for photography, I could not. I was blind to my own possibilities.

I genuinely believe that if something is right for you - it has a tendency to grow and take on a life of its own. I call it 'positive flow'. When I'm creating work, the best images tend to just come easily. Similarly, with anything in life, if it's right - it tends to have a natural flow to it. When it's not right because maybe the timing is wrong, or 'something' is wrong, it tends to jam, to get stuck. Good artists, I feel, know this. They have a natural intuition that tells them where to go with their work and how best to keep moving forward. It took me a long while to listen to that intuition.

Sometimes who we think we are, or how we see ourselves, may be outdated, Applying labels to ourselves can be limiting, while compartmentalising what we do as creative individuals is perhaps the most restrictive thing we can do.

These days, I try to keep things open. I prefer to see myself as a 'creative person' rather than as a photographer, because It allows my creativity to go wherever it feels it wants to.

With this in mind, I feel I am ready to embrace any new direction that I may go, because I understand that not to, would be a great disservice to my true self.

When you think you're just about lost - you're probably nearly there

Last week I posted this article about keeping objectivity in what we do.  As a response to my post, I received a few emails from readers who were preoccupied with a more fundamental aspect of their creativity: that of knowing whether any of what they do is any good. The nature of the questions I received were more along the lines of 'what if you think all of your work isn't any good?' or 'how do I know when I should give up on something?'.

I came here on a hunch. I had no guarantee's that anything I would shoot in the Puna regions would be any good. I also found that the majority of what I did shoot wasn't any good. The final portfolio on this site is only a tiny fraction of what I did shoot, and it took me a while to see there was still something of value - because upon first review, I had assumed I'd gotten nothing.

No one is alone in feeling that their work sucks from time to time. I fully sympathise with these feelings because I get them just like everybody else does. In fact, I think it is part of the natural process of being a creative person to have doubts and feelings of dissatisfaction about what you do from time to time.

There are often spells in my own creativity when things don't happen, or that I am dissatisfied with the results. But the thing is: I understand that I am at the mercy of my own creativity. I can't control it, and I just have to accept that sometimes I am going to suck. I've just over the years realised that it's ok to suck.

I've been a creative person all of my life: whether it was drawing and painting as a kid, music composition during my teenage years and 20's, and photography since my 30's, to know that creativity has an ebb and flow to it. I can't control it. So it's best to ride it out. 

Besides, sometimes when I find the work is not going the way I wish it to, it's usually because of a change within me. Sometimes the reason why new images don't seem to work is because I'm on the cusp of something new. Other times it's just because I'm tired, or maybe needing a rest and it's time to do something else for a while.

Besides, if we created wonderful work all the time, then it would simply become our new 'average'. So I think it is natural to have this 'tug' of balancing one's own aspirations against one's own abilities.

Growth can often be painful.

If you feel your work isn't up to the standards you'd like it to be, the best bit of advice I can give you is to get it out of your system so you can move on. Everything we do is a stepping-stone - a mark in time. If you keep working endlessly on something that isn't working, then you are stuck. So best just produce it, even if the experience wasn't a good one, and move on.

I think creativity is all about letting go. It is about giving yourself permission to make mistakes and it is about deliberately getting lost. For being lost, means that you are somewhere new in your work, which is often an opportunity to learn.

Creativity is not about controlling the entire process and neither is it about knowing where you are all the time. If you want a guarantee about what you are doing, then creativity is not for you.

Each time I pick up my camera, I have no idea whether the results will be successful. So when I do start out looking for new images, I do so with an openness to failing. I fully accept that some of my images will be better than others, and because of this, I avoid giving myself a hard time about it.

So be kind to your creativity. When you feel it isn't working, best give it a rest and do something else for a while. The inspiration will return.

And also remember, that when you think you're lost with what you are doing, you're probably nearly there :-)

Valle de Daliì

This week I've been working on the images I shot in Bolivia this summer.

I have a lot to say on the matter, but right now, thought I would share these images with you today. They were made in the Dalì desert - it's not a region you can get to in 4WD as it is now off-limits, to protect the region from car tracks messing it up. This means that you have to walk uphill for 2 hours from the roadside and because the altitude is around 4,000 metres - isn't easy going due to the lack of air.

My guide and myself started to walk into the Dalì region at around 2pm and didn't get into the area until just after 4:30pm. On my walk, I noticed that the sand colour would abruptly change from light tones to dark tones, and indeed, you can see some evidence of this feature in the pictures above - what might look like shadows on the surface of the desert floor is actually the variance in tone from one sand texture to another. 

The rock formations here are spread out over such a large distance, that its impossible to visit them all, so I really just had to opt for one location and stay there for the evening shoot. And what light / cloud formations we had. As much as I try not to pre-visualise a shoot before visiting a place, I had seen the Dalì stones from the side of the road and it had been a place i'd had in my mind's eye for some time. I often find that when I go back to somewhere I know well, I have a 'list' of things I would like to capture. You see, the first visit to any place often feels like you skim off the really obvious places, and each subsequent visit requires more effort, or you start to visit places that are more off the beaten track. That's exactly what I'd hoped for during my private time in Bolivia this year.

It has to be said that it is also the hardest place to 'be'. Photography wise it is quite easy because each morning and evening the light is often superb, but in terms of what the environment is doing to you - it's tough.

I found over the two weeks that I was living up at high elevation (3,600m to 4,800m), my lips got chapped, the skin on my hands started to blister from the overall dryness of the place and dust was never to far away from me most of the time. The temperatures range from -17ºc in the morning to 20ºC in the sun during the day (but the wind is always present and it feels much colder). The UV light is hard on your skin and your eyes, plus, each time you step into the shade, the temperature plummets.

But what a landscape. It is the place I'm most interested in and inspired in right now with my own photography.

Transposing Tones

I've been working on a new e-Book for some time now - 'Tonal Relationships'. 

Each time I begin work on a new project, it can really take a while to move off the landing pad. I found this to be particularly true when I wrote my Fast-Track to Photoshop e-Book, which actually took me about two years. Most of it was a sense of procrastination because each time I approached it, I felt I was tackling it from the wrong perspective.

A work in progress. It's better to release something when it's right. It may be some time yet :-)

I'm a great believer in sleeping on things if I don't know the answer. Backing off from something and giving my mind the time to collate and make sense of something works really well for me. I've found that adopting this approach to my photography, as well as writing e-books and also in life experiences, has been invaluable.

I found that just by leaving my 'Fast Track to Photoshop' e-book idea on the shelf for a long long while, I seemed to get clarity on how it should be formed, and when I did get round to writing it, it all came out very easily and I felt I wrote one of my most clear and concise efforts to date.

Well, I'm not there yet with my Tonal Relationships e-book, as I've been having difficulty trying to figure out how to proceed, but I've noticed that over the past few weeks I've started to formulate a structure for how the e-book should be laid out and things are getting clearer in my head.

One aspect that has become clear to me over the past few years, is that tonal relationships do not just have to work within each single image, but in order to help with defining your own style, I think the tones should remain consistent through any body of work you produce. For instance, I've noticed that when I convert my colour work to monochrome, I'm able to see how consistent my work is - strip away the colours, and the images still appear to be very balanced.

It was only when I converted some of my existing colour work to mono, that I discovered how consistent I was with my tonal ranges in my work.

Anyway, I digress a little. Here right now, is a rough idea of how I feel the e-Book may be laid out. I'm always open to things changing, and trying to not be too fixed on things, because creativity needs the space to go where it wants to go.

Main ideas of book:

• Relationships throughout the frame - by strengthening one area of the frame, other tones are affected
• If you make two areas of the frame the same tone - they become related.
• If you make two areas of the frame different, they become unrelated.
• The odd tone out is the dominant one. If you keep one area of the picture different from the rest, it becomes the dominant tone. White stone on black background, or black stone on white background

Fieldwork Awareness Section

• learn to think about tones while out making pictures: abstraction versus association
• being aware of colour constancy / chromatic adaption while you work under different lighting conditions, and applying this to your choice of subject
• Avoiding overly complex tonal compositions

Darkroom Workbook Section

• Transposing Tones - take one tone in the image, and shift it (harris hills in harris photos)
• Look for images in your collection that have very few tones. Edit them so all the tones become more similar
• Simple compositions aren’t necessarily of one or two objects. Sometimes they are simple because they contain one or two dominant tones. Busy images can have too much tonal information in them. 
• Image selection: choose those with simple tonal relationships, because it will make the task of editing them easier.
• image selection: when toning one image, refer to others in the collection for guidance. Often one image will dictate how the others should be edited, so they 'sit together' better.
• Is your eye being pulled all over the place by too many tonal distractions? Apply localised contrasts, or reduce contrast in other areas to bring emphasis to other areas.

Moving between fixed and fluid creative states

I made this photo of Stac Pollaidh (pronounced Stack Polly) last October during an exceptionally windy day. I've known of this location at the end of the loch for some time, having first spotted it many years ago on a week long workshop with a group. I was drawn to the criss-crossed lines in the foreground rock, and knew that if I could be here when the conditions were right, then I might get what I envisaged in my mind's eye.

I've stuck with the same film type for years now because I love it, and because I know it well. You could say this is part of my structured approach to creativity.

I've found over the years of repeatedly going back to places, I learn how the landscape works. I begin to understand where the light is coming from and where to be at sunrise and sunset, but I also get to know some of the more intimate details of the locations I visit - the criss-crossed features of the foreground rocks in the above picture is a perfect example of that.

Continuing from my previous post, I think it's important to keep things fluid. I love to go for a wander and to find things by chance, or to encounter something where there was no pre-visualisation involved. It's very freeing to work with what you're given. But there is also value in researching places and building up knowledge of locations too. I like both approaches and tend to move between fluid and fixed states all the time.

I think my personality has dual sides: in some ways I prefer to be structured while in others I prefer to be fluid. For example, i'm very structured with my technical process. I've used the same film stock for many years now, and I never deviate from it. I am also very wary of changing even the smallest of things in my workflow, because I believe it could have far reaching consequences that I'm unable to comprehend until much later. But I also like to be very fluid - I prefer not to pre-visualise a scene, often going for what feels right at the time. This is not just in what I choose to shoot while on location, but also in how I edit the work. I like to keep an open mind in this regard as I may find later when I come to review the photographs that I see something different or new in them. 

So I think to be creative, we need to be able to move between these two states of being fluid and fixed. Being fluid allows us to find new things and find inspiration, while being fixed allows us to shape them - to give our ideas structure and to see them through to completion.

The skill however, is in knowing which state to be in, and when :-)

I like to try out my shots in black and white sometimes. They may be better in monochrome, but even if they aren't, I maybe notice new things about the image when viewed with the colour removed. It allows me to free up what I'm doing and I think this is perhaps a fluid aspect to my creativity.

Becoming Unstuck

I've been able to get outside a lot, and create new images. But what I've been having trouble with, is actually getting round to scanning the work and editing it. The problem is that since I'm so busy running a workshop business, when I do get some free time, I've not been feeling that I have any energy left to deal with the backlog of work that has been piling up in my studio.

Nisa Bost, Isle of Harris, November 2014. © Bruce Percy

When images start to pile up like this, it can have some negative side-effects to your own psyche. Firstly, if too much time passes, then it gets increasingly more difficult to look at the work. I can easily become so distanced from it, that I actually start to dread looking at it. Before long, any work that's left undone for too long starts to feel like a burden to look at. It begins to feel like a chore. And this simply isn't a good position to be in.

Then before long, a sense of perfectionism starts to creep in. You're so worried to look at the work in case it doesn't live up to what you hoped it might be that procrastination soon becomes the order of the day. And this is like a compound problem - a problem that is created on the top of a problem you started out with, and things just start to get far too complicated.

Creating art is all in the mind, and to be able to create work, we must have a healthy attitude towards what it is that we do. Once things like perfectionism and procrastination creep in, then things can quickly start to get out of hand and before long you can become lost.

Part of my problem has been that when I do create new images out in the field, I often find I have very little free time at home to work on them. So I decided this summer since I have some time off from my yearly schedule, that I would brace myself and get in and start to work on some of my blacklog.

I'd be lying if I said it wasn't easy to get started. So much time had passed, and I felt the weight of the work pressing upon me, but somehow I managed to get going, and I'm so glad I did.

Sea grass, Isle of Harris, Outer Hebrides, Scotland 2014. © Bruce Percy

I've now found that things have turned around for me and I'm feeling enthused about the new work, and it's slowly but surely gotten under my skin, so much so, that rather than dreading starting work on something new, I now find myself unable to keep away from it.

So I've learned something about myself as well as the creative process. I've learned that in order to keep a healthy attitude towards ones own art, I must keep on creating at all costs. Even if I feel the work isn't up to much, I should still work on it anyway - because in doing so - I gets cleared out of the way. I know from life experience, that new things can only come into my life provided I've made room for them.  So get it out of the way. 

One thing you must also consider, is that it's ok to create bad work, otherwise again, a sense of perfectionism will grow and you'll be stuck once again. We are not masters of our own creativity and therefore we can't control when we will create our best or worst work. There is just an ebb and flow that means our work will fluctuate. Either way, bad work has to be flushed out of the system - it still needs to be worked on and besides, we learn something from the bad work as well as the good.

White sand, Seilebost beach, Isle of Harris, November 2014. © Bruce Percy

So I've also had to recognise that I shouldn't be so precious. Art is about creativity, and for creativity to happen, things have to remain fluid. This means letting go.

When you start to control things too tightly, things stop flowing, and before you know it, you're back to being stuck again.

So keep working, keep creating and allow yourself to be open and fluid with what you do. Your output may vary, but the important thing is that you're going somewhere with it, and you're avoiding becoming stuck.

Success Rate

Ansel Adams said if he was able to make one good image a year that he liked,
he was doing well.

I'm very much in agreement with the sentiment behind Ansel's statement as I'd personally prefer to produce a very small quantity of high-quality work, than a lot of average images.

I've been thinking about how I dislike the terms 'hit-rate' and 'success-rate', as I feel that measuring one's own creativity is a destructive thing to do. Instead, I prefer to just be aware that my creativity has an ebb and a flow to it. For instance, I've found since I started this website way back in 2001, that I only manage to add a hand-full of images a year to it. But each time I do go to look at my archive work and recent work sections, I'm very aware that the work has taken a lot of time, patience and effort to create. 

I'm not that prolific and I as I see it, there are a few factors at play that determine my output.

This image wasn't planned, nor did I ever think I would make an image of Flamingos. But by returning again and again to a place, I can often find that things happen - wonderful things :-)

Firstly, I have my own sense of what I feel is acceptable. I call it my 'in-built-quality-control', and it's what I use to determine whether an image is good or bad. Hopefully, I'm not too harsh on myself (by setting the bar unrealistically far too high), nor too easy on myself (by being happy to publish everything I do). Quality control is vital in understanding yourself, where you are artistically and for ensuring that others get a clear picture of how you see yourself.  I'd like to suggest you read this article of mine, which I wrote about the final selection process where I started out with around 400 images and filtered it down to around 30 or 40 I was happy to publish.

Secondly, I don't measure myself based on any success rate. I don't measure myself at all as I feel it's an unhealthy thing to do. Instead I accept that my creativity has its own natural flow which I can't control. None of us know when we are about to create our best work, nor our worst. A good photographer is open to new things coming in and to letting go of things that don't work, otherwise it's possible to become stuck.

I also understand the value of creating bad work. To get to the good work requires experimentation and an openness to try things out which may fail. Exploring the possibilities of one's own creativity requires us to be able to deal with failure because there will be many failures along the way. But rather than using the word 'failure' though, I would prefer to use the word 'experiment' or perhaps 'work in progress'. It's a much more constructive way to look at work that didn't meet your own standards. Our work is never finished anyway - we are always in a constant state of change.

The difficult to photograph Cerro Torre in the northern part of Los Glaciares national park, Argentina. This is perhaps the image I spent most energy on getting. I had visited this area several times over several years, often coming home with nothing - the place is so famous for its bad weather. I've had so many emails from readers who told me they saw nothing when they were here. Well, I camped here once for more than a couple of weeks and I saw nothing too.... but I kept returning and I got this shot for a brief 5 minute window.

Lastly, but perhaps most importantly, I understand that good work is the culmination of many things such as time, effort and patience. A good portfolio is not created overnight nor with little effort. Instead, good work is accumulated gradually over many years, with a lot of of experiments along the way and with a lot of perseverance. I also find that living with the work for many years allows me to have a sense of distance which brings a certain level of objectivity and awareness. I am always considering and reconsidering my older work. It allows me to notice changes within me.

So I think 'success rate' is a poor demonstrator for my art. I prefer not to think about this because everything I do, right from the experiments to the keepers - is all part of the creative process. Creative work should never be measured, instead it should just be allowed to flow in its own way and under its own pace.

Something in-between Sunlight & Shadow

For a long while now, I've been fascinated by the power of suggestion over a more literal interpretation. I was initially attracted to this aspect of photography through the work of Michael Kenna in the late 80's. His use of shadows and night often convey a sense of mystery or at the very least mood to his imagery.

Just recently, I found out about Ray Metzker, who passed away last year. His work conveys similar concepts to Kenna's. He was interested in suggestion rather than a literal translation. His use of sunlight and shadow to conceal his subjects often lent his work a sense of mystery.

 Solitary pedestrians and urban spaces transformed by sunlight and shadow. Image © Ray Metzker

Suggestion is a powerful tool to possess as a photographer - because being able to get your audience to stop and listen to what you are doing often happens through the art of suggestion.

 In Ray Metzker's images, he shows tremendous skill in using sunlight and shadow to convey mystery. What may have otherwise been an ordinary scene becomes more interesting and thought provoking when shade is used to conceal or reveal.

Ray would produce portfolios based on these tonal suggestions rather than by subject matter. This resonates with me because I feel I have been doing something similar; for a while now, I have been choosing images where they are related either by tonal response or by colour palette.

Ray Metzker's use of sunlight and shadow was masterful. Image © Ray Metzker

To explain further, I find Iceland to be a monochromatic place: black sand and white ice. Bolivia is about blues and reds: the lagoons of red sediments and the salt flats at twilight intertwine to offer up a particular colour palette. So I tend to go looking for subjects that fit together tonally or by colour - as a collection. These two places are responsible alone for me branching out into monochrome work. They have taught me that the portfolio - the whole is greater than the sum of its parts.

I see a similarity in Ray Meskier's work where he chooses subjects that are collected together by tonal similarities. People in the city often photographed as silhouettes, or with their identities concealed by use of shadow strengthen his portfolio as well as lend a very decisive look.

Images don't always have to utilise the full tonal range. Here Ray Metzker uses mostly shadow to mid-tones only. I find the deliberate concealment of the people's faces adds further mystery to the image. Image © Ray Metzker

His work has a style - something that we are all trying to develop or bring forward in our own work. And this is perhaps the most important lesson from looking at this work: it's clear that Mezkier has thought about the aesthetic qualities of his final selection of images and also the subject matter in such a way that we are clear each photograph is by the same author.

I learn a lot by looking at work that I find inspiring. It doesn't have to be landscape related for me to 'get it'. I just have to find a connection in the work - to see something that I find intriguing, or that makes sense to me in some way that I hadn't thought of. With Ray Metzker's work, I do exactly that. I learn about image selection based on using tonal responses but I also learn that his choice to make people very anonymous or to conceal their identities through his use of shadow and sunlight can lend the work a thematic quality which goes a long way in conveying a photographic style.

And sometimes it's the sudden split between shadow and sunlight that throws a contrast; like two images spliced together, providing a sense of tension between the two subjects in the frame. Image © Ray Metzker

And then there are his choices in composition. I've always thought that street photography has less to do with aesthetics and more to do with narrative. But in Ray's work the story is missing. He has deliberately chosen to conceal most of his subjects so we know very little about them. Instead we are presented with compositions constructed through form and tone only. They are like landscape studies about the people in a city.

A study of graphic qualities. Image © Ray Metzker

Your own voice

 This week I was interviewed by the UK photographic magazine 'Black & White Photography'. It was interesting to find out that they were particularly interested in my isle of Harris photos below. 

During my chat with Mark Bentley, we got on to the subject of style and that of finding your own voice.

Isle of Harris images as requested by the Uk magazine 'Black & White Photography'. I'm always surprised by the choices others make when choosing which images of mine to use for publication.

I've learned that I can't guess how some of my images will be received, and I never hear the same things about them. This has taught me that I just need to listen and trust my own intuition first and foremost. I can't anticipate what others will like or dislike about my work, and the only person I need to satisfy is myself.

I've worked with many participants through the years on my workshops here in Scotland. The subject of finding a style is never far away from our daily critique sessions, so it's only natural that I should have formed some views on this.

To my mind, a voice is a unique thing. to be recognised, you need to stand out from everyone else in some way. So I think the main characteristic of those who create very personal work is that they have a deep trust in themselves to be independent and do their own thing.

Anyone who does something unique does so,  because they do not to pander to trends or others opinions. Take it from me: I hear opinions about my work from others all the time and there is so much variety in what others tell me, that I've come to the conclusion that if I tried to follow it - I'd get lost pretty quickly. Instead, what I choose to do (note that I'm the one choosing what to do here) - is listen to the stuff that makes sense or enlightens me in some way.  The rest - the stuff that I feel doesn't make sense or can't see any value in, I just take as someone else's opinion. Interestingly, I find that most of the time, others opinions usually tell me more about them, than me.

No one else can live my life or make my creative decisions for me. The only person who knows where I want to go with my photography is ultimately me. I can glean some advice from others but in general, the impetus to do anything in my work has to come from within. 

So here are my thoughts on finding your own voice.

• Your own voice, is something you find when you go it alone.
• Your own voice, is something that only you can find.
• Your own voice, is something that comes through a process of self enquiry.
• Your own voice, is something that becomes apparent over time.
• Your own voice, is something that comes to you when you listen and observe the changes within you.
• Your own voice, can't be found by being part of the derivative. Follow others and you quickly get lost in a sea of ubiquity.
• Your own voice, is something that happens when you are free of current trends.
• Your own voice, is something that comes when you don't try to please others.
• Your own voice, is something that comes when you are free of expectations.
• Your own voice, is something that comes when you are free of ego.
• Your own voice, is something that comes when you know yourself (i.e your capabilities and limitations).
• Your own voice, comes when you stop copying your influences. Embrace your influences and use them as the basis for where you start, but don't get tied to them.
• Your own voice, comes when you do your art for you and you alone.

In a nutshell, you need to have the courage to follow your own path, and above all, believe in yourself.