FA+
Shop
On artists who delete their old work.
14 years ago
Let me just say this is not about artists who up and leave and take their work with them. That's a symbolic gesture and in most cases when I see it, it's because their work was being abused, they personally were being abused and they just can't handle it anymore. It breaks my heart to see good artists and seemingly good people pushed to that breaking point and I fully support artists who clear out their galleries because people have been assholes and they just can't stay.
No, this is about artists who just clear out their old work and only show their newest and best. Never mind people might appreciate those older works as having beauty in their own right, they're "bad" and no one must see them. Or especially when artists clear out their old, crappy stuff from when they first started. I ultimately think it's really dickish and here's why.
A lot of people look at all the beautiful art and develop an "either you have it or you don't" complex. And yes, I call it a complex, because it kills their confidence in their own art abilities. And why shouldn't they think that way, seeing gallery after gallery of art that shows nothing but brilliant success? It just all magically appears with no indication of how long it took to do, but more importantly, no indication of how long it took to LEARN to do. Keeping up your old, bad work shows where you came from - your development, your successes, your failures, your learning process - and how you got to where you are now. Honestly, I think artists who dump that are selfish. I have yet to delete a single thing I've put up and honestly, it surprises me just how many faves they still get. I didn't know how to write porn until I got here. I just started doing whatever interested me and honestly writing this is making me want to put up old crap that I finished and then just never reviewed and put up. Certain experimental pieces, my "real" first story, and so on.
Mind you, I already had writing experience before I started on smut. I used to spend most of my free time writing novels which would show my development even better if any of them still existed. Sadly, that machine is quite dead and I have no good way of recovering my data, even if it didn't get wiped by the lightning. But the point is you guys can look back (not nearly as far back in my gallery as I'd like, honestly) and see everything I've put up.
Dragging myself back on topic, the reason I think deleting your old work is selfish is because nobody gets to be Grisser or Rrowdybeast in a day. Fen had two accounts before that, being SilverFenrir and later UnshackledFenrir before now, and having kept and re-uploaded a good deal of his older work, which still exists on the UF account. Taking down all your old, crappy stuff is great for promoting yourself, but bad for encouraging others. Isn't art supposed to be a community? Isn't a community supposed to help support its members? Dazzling people is all well and good, but putting yourself up atop a seemingly impossibly high pedestal and then burning the stairs behind you leaves newer, less experienced artists living in the ash and soot while they look at you as shining and unreachable. When you're that high up, without a stairway to your position, there's no reaching down to help your fellow artists build and climb their own path. It makes a lot of people just give up and leave. I'll admit that's a good deal of the reason I write, although in my case I'm validly impaired by a clinical lack of fine motor coordination. This journal will likely take me over a half hour to type, including review. But I'd be less adverse to doing art (I do enjoy sketching and once in a great while do costume designs) if it hadn't been waved in my face for so many years that other people can do amazing works of detail in the time it takes me to scratch out something simple. In theory, I could get to be that good, but given that it took me until college to learn to type at something like ten words a minute, and I still doubt I've broken twenty, much less thirty, the amount of practice it would take is daunting, and this is coming from a guy with an inherent grasp of anatomy and lighting on his side. For people who are less ridiculously visual (irony of ironies) and lack the same confidence as I do (when I do sketch I pour myself into it and can say I'm still proud of everything I've done), their hindrance isn't physical like mine; it's mental, because they're bombarded with all the final products without ever getting to see the roughs.
So, artists, if you're considering doing "housekeeping," don't. Ultimately, leaving your old art up is of nothing but benefit. Other people get to see you better as a human being instead of a figure, they get to learn from you just by looking, and, really, it'll probably help keep you grounded. Sometimes I think artists forget where they came from whether it's intentional or not unless they have the past staring them in the face. Good concepts that you couldn't do before can be redone and compared to the originals for both your benefit and everyone else's. Or maybe you can just look back at your old work and smile at how proud you were of that old crap, or maybe you'll decide you didn't used to be that bad after all. Maybe you'll look back at it for a while and hate it, but given a little time and distance will be able to look back and realize it was actually better than you gave it credit for when you notice all the stuff you did right instead of all you did wrong. I look back at my old work quite often, and while I'll admit I fix typos and such, I never retcon anything. I've found old poetry from middle school that I don't even remember writing that's been so good I didn't even realize it was mine at first. No name on the page, but it's about something that was unique or important to me at the time. I just recently read through Glass Box again and have to say that, really, that one I said I hated and and just shat out? Really not that bad. Not amazing, but it said what it had to and is readable. Give your own work a fair chance, or at least let yourself be brave enough to show off that, yeah, sometimes great artists really do crank out crap.
No, this is about artists who just clear out their old work and only show their newest and best. Never mind people might appreciate those older works as having beauty in their own right, they're "bad" and no one must see them. Or especially when artists clear out their old, crappy stuff from when they first started. I ultimately think it's really dickish and here's why.
A lot of people look at all the beautiful art and develop an "either you have it or you don't" complex. And yes, I call it a complex, because it kills their confidence in their own art abilities. And why shouldn't they think that way, seeing gallery after gallery of art that shows nothing but brilliant success? It just all magically appears with no indication of how long it took to do, but more importantly, no indication of how long it took to LEARN to do. Keeping up your old, bad work shows where you came from - your development, your successes, your failures, your learning process - and how you got to where you are now. Honestly, I think artists who dump that are selfish. I have yet to delete a single thing I've put up and honestly, it surprises me just how many faves they still get. I didn't know how to write porn until I got here. I just started doing whatever interested me and honestly writing this is making me want to put up old crap that I finished and then just never reviewed and put up. Certain experimental pieces, my "real" first story, and so on.
Mind you, I already had writing experience before I started on smut. I used to spend most of my free time writing novels which would show my development even better if any of them still existed. Sadly, that machine is quite dead and I have no good way of recovering my data, even if it didn't get wiped by the lightning. But the point is you guys can look back (not nearly as far back in my gallery as I'd like, honestly) and see everything I've put up.
Dragging myself back on topic, the reason I think deleting your old work is selfish is because nobody gets to be Grisser or Rrowdybeast in a day. Fen had two accounts before that, being SilverFenrir and later UnshackledFenrir before now, and having kept and re-uploaded a good deal of his older work, which still exists on the UF account. Taking down all your old, crappy stuff is great for promoting yourself, but bad for encouraging others. Isn't art supposed to be a community? Isn't a community supposed to help support its members? Dazzling people is all well and good, but putting yourself up atop a seemingly impossibly high pedestal and then burning the stairs behind you leaves newer, less experienced artists living in the ash and soot while they look at you as shining and unreachable. When you're that high up, without a stairway to your position, there's no reaching down to help your fellow artists build and climb their own path. It makes a lot of people just give up and leave. I'll admit that's a good deal of the reason I write, although in my case I'm validly impaired by a clinical lack of fine motor coordination. This journal will likely take me over a half hour to type, including review. But I'd be less adverse to doing art (I do enjoy sketching and once in a great while do costume designs) if it hadn't been waved in my face for so many years that other people can do amazing works of detail in the time it takes me to scratch out something simple. In theory, I could get to be that good, but given that it took me until college to learn to type at something like ten words a minute, and I still doubt I've broken twenty, much less thirty, the amount of practice it would take is daunting, and this is coming from a guy with an inherent grasp of anatomy and lighting on his side. For people who are less ridiculously visual (irony of ironies) and lack the same confidence as I do (when I do sketch I pour myself into it and can say I'm still proud of everything I've done), their hindrance isn't physical like mine; it's mental, because they're bombarded with all the final products without ever getting to see the roughs.
So, artists, if you're considering doing "housekeeping," don't. Ultimately, leaving your old art up is of nothing but benefit. Other people get to see you better as a human being instead of a figure, they get to learn from you just by looking, and, really, it'll probably help keep you grounded. Sometimes I think artists forget where they came from whether it's intentional or not unless they have the past staring them in the face. Good concepts that you couldn't do before can be redone and compared to the originals for both your benefit and everyone else's. Or maybe you can just look back at your old work and smile at how proud you were of that old crap, or maybe you'll decide you didn't used to be that bad after all. Maybe you'll look back at it for a while and hate it, but given a little time and distance will be able to look back and realize it was actually better than you gave it credit for when you notice all the stuff you did right instead of all you did wrong. I look back at my old work quite often, and while I'll admit I fix typos and such, I never retcon anything. I've found old poetry from middle school that I don't even remember writing that's been so good I didn't even realize it was mine at first. No name on the page, but it's about something that was unique or important to me at the time. I just recently read through Glass Box again and have to say that, really, that one I said I hated and and just shat out? Really not that bad. Not amazing, but it said what it had to and is readable. Give your own work a fair chance, or at least let yourself be brave enough to show off that, yeah, sometimes great artists really do crank out crap.
