JMW Turner is quoted as having said: ‘It is only when we are no longer fearful that we begin to create’, and from years of tutoring as well as painting I am inclined to agree that what holds most of us back from producing paintings we think of as successful is simply the fear of failing. The odds are against us from the start. As students we mostly study paintings by artists who have achieved fame and universal recognition. How can we possibly succeed like these great painters? Apart from their reputations, we have to meet the challenge of our own aspirations, always moving the bar up even while our work is steadily improving. Even the greatest of painters must have produced works that they recognised as failures, to be consigned to the rubbish bin or painted over.
I regularly run into that barrier of selfcriticism, feeling I am wasting my time by trying to make a particular painting work. In fact, this has happened so often that I
