Thread: Visitors' poll
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Old 10-06-2007, 07:30 PM   #156
Steven Sweeney Steven Sweeney is offline
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PT 5+ years
 
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Joined: Nov 2001
Location: Stillwater, MN
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Well, one approach is for the member in question not to assume the worst, but to assume at worst that nobody has seen the post yet or had time to respond to it. Use the "bump up" technique, which is to respond to one's own post by re-soliciting comments. There have been countless instances in which folks gladly offer comments and critiques and lament that they had somehow not been earlier aware of the thread. Folks need to be persistent.

As for humiliation, here's a little story on myself. I signed up for a multi-year course of study in classical realism, based on nothing more than that I'd painted a few rudimentary landscapes while living overseas and thought I'd like to pursue painting as at least a serious avocation. I lived about 25 miles from the studio (once I returned to the U.S.). Halfway there on the first day, I very nearly talked myself into turning around. I had going on in my head what writer Annie Lamott calls Radio KFKD (from the book, "Bird by Bird"), which sends out a message that you're not good enough for this, you never will be, you're out of your league, and you deserve to be humiliated. I didn't turn around, but I was trembling by the time I got to the studio. I was let in through the locked door but then pretty much ignored and I was in agony, ready to bolt the next time the door opened. The first morning began with a life drawing exercise, something I had NEVER done. Most of the other students were light years ahead of me, but it wasn't their job to mentor the new guy. I had to borrow an easel from a part-time student, because there weren't enough. I expected that to be taken care of, but was simply shunted off, told that I would "have to improvise." Hey, no pressure at all. (I in fact built an easel that night, finishing it at 3 a.m. -- years later, one of the instructors is still slightly astonished by that. I use it to this day.) It would still be 2 or 3 days before my first critique by an instructor, by which time I was, to use the word, completely humiliated.

It was good for me. It let me know exactly where I was, and what I needed to do to get better. And I came back the next day and the next and for the next three years, every day. My work embarrassed me for at least a year. Then it got better, and by the 50th or so drawing and 30th or so painting, the fear of humiliation was gone.

For some of us without a lot of natural confidence, that's the way it has to be done, or not at all. I wish I'd been such a natural and so self-assured that I hadn't had to put myself through all that, but I can now draw and paint well, and I'm very grateful that I didn't turn the truck around that first morning.

Same thing, with the reaction to an unsatisfying response to a Forum post. You have to want it and go after it.
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Steven Sweeney
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