F**k Colleen Barry.

Or rather, my internal dialogue that has adopted her voice

Studio updates had to go on mute as a commercial job with a very tight deadline screamed onto my desk. All frenzied panic about whether I work on toys for Christmas, jewellery for my Nov 7th showcase, or the two canvases I’ve promised Arch Enemy Arts this October was sidelined in favour of poster art for a film that I’m a really big fan of. They don’t say “the antidote for workload panic is to put more shit on your plate”, but I do. And it works wonders for:

Creative block borne of self-doubt

and

Self-doubt.

Do the work and let the work do you.

Between creating mock-ups, waiting for approval, and then requesting sign-off from the studio, I grabbed my oils and tried in vain to ignore the headlines Colleen Barry teases on instagram stories for her substack and the resulting discourse on Reddit. Yeah, I go there. But I don’t go to her substack. It’s paywalled.

I pay for art, pay for creative effort, and yeah, I’ll pay for paranormal podcasts because my personal tastes stopped developing at 14, but I’m not paying for art criticism. I’m not mentally stable enough to read it without letting the fact that I’m lightyears away from the blue-chip art universe make me feel awful about my own work, (which I am able to enjoy with a paranormal podcast). Insert sunglasses emoji.

I’m a really big fan of Colleen’s work. I (even) paid for some of her technical content on Patreon, and I’m at least self-aware enough to know that the cunt that mans the self-deprecation desk in my brain will always take on the voice of someone whose work I hold in high esteem. Especially if I don’t have to work too hard to imagine them being kind of a dick about other artists.

r/Contemporary Art (for the unitiated, that’s a sub-reddit dedicated to art chat) decided to go into hair-splitting detail about the technical merits of Barry, who was allegedly taking shots at Shasha Gordon. I didn’t read Colleen’s piece, but hearing the anonymous educated wax lyrical about two highly skilled, accomplished, and very visible artists with a lot of exciting work in the zeitgeist and in actual galleries of actual New York City really did a number on either my hand-eye coordination or the part of my brain that judges my hand-eye coordination- because a painting that started really well and was thoroughly enjoyable, rapidly shat the proverbial bed. Man, was the imagined woman in my head scorning my efforts. I really started to resent her.

This happening in the midst of my too-busy-and-plain-terrified-to-pause moment of the year, meant that I had to stop. Say “Fuck Colleen Barry” out loud, to my painting (but really the acidic voice in my head that she has no affiliation with), and leave the room.

I started over. It’s going well. Someone is murdering a whole bunch of old folks in the audiobook I’m currently listening to, and it’s raining. What I mean to say is, everything is good again, and I’m back on track.

The magic words worked, and they’re now my mantra.

Fuck Colleen Barry.

Here’s where I lay myself bare and share the cause of my little mental war, all 12” of it.

I was having so much fun before I wasn't, and started afresh. I never do this. I usually tough it out but I'm suddenly 40 and don't care about measuring my sweat.