An Artist's Work is Never Done

One of the greatest lessons I learned about art was during my freshman year at AAU. As a young artist, I was not confident in my abilities and had a tendency to overwork my art...

I never knew when I was done. One of my professors,
Henry Chan pulled me aside one day and told me how to stop.
He explained that in time, I would develop enough self-knowledge
to know when I was done with the art, rather than when the art was done.
In the meantime, he instructed,
I should churn out as much work as I could;

Instead of trying to perfect the piece I'm working on now,
I should move on and
put that energy into starting a new project (practice makes perfect, after all).
I think his view was that unfinished art was preferable to art that was taken too far,
and that interesting things were hidden in the imperfections.

It was wise advice and as 18 year-olds often do, I ignored it. As a result, I spent many more years perfecting, and thus destroying, my own work before coming around to his point of view.

I still have not fully learned this lesson. As some of you may have noticed, I have been messing around with the look of my website as well as revising and rewriting posts days after I've published them. Hence this revised photo, one of my first and still one of my favorites.

-Andy H. Tu
www.resilience-pictures.com
If you want to see more of my work, check me out on Instagram & Facebook