In my case it is not so much perfectionism that stuffs me up, but self-conciousness. The initial lines of this drawing were done on the first day that I moved into my new studio. I wanted to just carry on as I had been doing, making my large drawings, but after these lines appeared I immediately realised that something was wrong.
It took me some weeks to work out that I couldn't transplant my whole work process to a new space over a few days and expect to just carry on. And then, in a curious second version of this attempting to just carry on, the first thing I did when I reclaimed my home work space was to pull out this badly-begun drawing and see what I could discover by working into it.
Well, I've had some interesting adventures with it. But in the end, the self-consciousness of those first lines seemed to set the scene for something that was compositionally doomed from the start. No matter what adventures I may have had, the beginning wrongness set the conditions for something that was never going to be overcome.
The motto from the struggle this drawing represents seems to be, 'never start an improvisation with any kind of self-consciousness'.
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