Finding Strength in the Struggle
All artists struggle at least one point in their artistic career and process. Colley Whisson finds that painting is more of a long-term discipline. This is great for artists because we have a great deal of opportunity for growth in the short term sometimes. But, mostly it’s the long game. Colley always tells himself he needs to remain patient in the moment, day, and hours he is painting. In the weeks, months, and years. You are looking at growth over those years. With that growth, there is always growing pains.
Colley remembers back in 2010, he was painting for an exhibition in Brisbane. He was doing a lot of Brisbane scenes like rivers, cities, and bridges. He had two different angles on the same bridge called the Story Bridge. It was built by the same gentleman who built the Sydney harbor bridge in the early 1930s. He hadn’t painted a lot of bridges up until that stage. He was starting to want to challenge himself, which is part of the growth he believes we should all include. He did this first painting and it took him about five hours, it was totally kicking his butt! Three hours in, he was thinking “You know what, I don’t think this is going to work.” He felt he was giving it everything he had. He then started to focus on getting one area working better, and finally he was able to finish. It was a fun scene, but it was a very technically difficult scene as well.
“Sometimes, the successes are more harmful than your disappointments or failures, because it is on those harder days that we learn more and think of new things outside of the box.”
At the end of it, he was happy with it. But, come next day, he painted the same bridge on the opposite side. This painting only took him 2.5 hours. It was the classic saying that the painting was almost painting itself. The second painting just flowed off the brush, it was so much easier. . It taught Colley so much about mental toughness and the conditioning of our minds. We do need to do a certain amount of painting to build up to the hard subjects. Colley has always been someone who he considered mentally tough, but there is always another level you can challenge yourself to get to. A lot of times, a big part of being an artist is figuring out why things don’t or do work. Sometimes, the successes are more harmful than your disappointments or failures, because it is on those harder days that we learn more and think of new things outside of the box. This helps us learn something we did not know the day before. The good painting days could be us just painting to our strengths, which is not always bad, but it is not as much scrapping, fighting, and learning.
To follow up with everything, the second-day painting that was the easier one, sold straight away. The difficult painting didn’t actually sell. He had 30 paintings and 21 sold. It was his favorite of the two paintings, but it didn’t sell! He got it back and decided he could re-work a few areas. Once he put it in an exhibition, it ended up selling! That painting took longer to paint and to find its forever home. This is how painting can be. We are often fighting our way through some of these paintings, having to re-work them, and learning as we go. Quitting is easy to cave in to. This is why finding strength in the struggle and looking at the good parts is important. Ultimately, it’s our ability to fight and push through that makes and creates better, stronger work. Even when things are going great and the paintings are flowing, it is never “easy.” And, it never should be, because this means we aren’t facing adversity and growing!
Colley is an experienced artist and passionate mentor when it comes to teaching his students. Join Colley below today:
To listen more on the topic of “Today’s Struggles are Tomorrow’s Successes,” listen to Colley & Gabor on the Paint and Clay podcast here.