This genuinely surprised me

Over the years, I've worked on - and overcome - a lot of limiting beliefs. I've defeated ideas about what artists can and can't achieve and I've beaten limiting beliefs about money ... but it seems there are always more limits on how we think that we keep uncovering.

I have known for a long time that I can sell my paintings. People like them. They do well. BUT I always believed that was only really possible via the internet because of where I lived. I assumed local people wouldn't like my abstract work. 

This weekend, that belief was turned on its head.

I took the new paintings to Scar Gallery on Tuesday, and she opened with them on Thursday morning. By Saturday several of them had sold to local people who either saw them in the window or wandered in for a look round and left with a painting.

It turns out that once again, I had been carrying around a belief that was simply invented out of thin air and bore no relation to reality. 

I can't count how many of these false beliefs I have held over the years without even realising it. Often they don't feel like beliefs as much as they feel like facts.

You will have some as well - beliefs about talent or age or money or life circumstances or other people. They will feel like certainties, but they are almost always inventions.

When I first realised this, I found it quite destabilising - if nothing is for sure, where do we stand? How do we know what to believe? - but now I find it inspiring and hopeful.

Nothing is for sure! None of your beliefs are facts! You can question everything! Suddenly a whole world of possibilities opens up. 

I've been thinking about this in relation to my art ... I already moved past some limiting beliefs such as 'you can't sand canvas' and 'you can't use soft pastels because they're too smudgy.' Now I'm wondering what else I might be believing that is holding me back.

I'm also starting to think that creativity isn't really about making things so much as it is about dismantling certainties.

Every good painting has required me to let go of something I thought was true.

Every new chapter of my life seems to ask exactly the same thing.

So I started thinking about how certainties actually block creativity. If I know something to be true, there is no more to find out, nothing to explore, no experiments needed. But if everything is uncertain, open and fluid, then the only way forward is to test things out, to try new things, and to see where they lead.

So I have a new question I am going to be asking myself on a regular basis and that question is: "What if I'm wrong?"

What if I'm wrong about what other people think? What if I'm wrong about what a medium can do? What if I'm wrong about what it takes to sell work at higher prices? What if I'm wrong about the ways to success as an artist?

And not just me --- what if other people are wrong? What if talking heads on Instagram are wrong? What if 'experts' are wrong? What if there are no set rules and no rights and wrongs? Then what might be possible....?