Art can be so subjective. You can create something that you think is your absolute best work but show it to someone else and they may just shrug it off in disinterest. This week's blog post is going to be used to outline my thoughts on what you should do with feedback, how you should take it and how you can use it to mould yourself and your future work.
Let's start with getting feedback. From my personal experience it is quite challenging to get feedback that is entirely genuine and useful, people tend to either not want to hurt your feelings, feel they don't know enough about the art you create or are for one reason or another hyper critical to the point of being hurtful. Filtering this out is the most challenging part of getting feedback that will actually help you move forward. I've found that the most reliable feedback that you can utilise for self-improvement comes from a combination of people closest to you (Who tend to be either incredibly critical or too nice) and those who you trust creatively, be it fellow artists you respect or friends who are into your chosen art form. These people are crucial to giving you developmental feedback (critique on your work that will actually benefit you in terms of both what you are doing right and what you are doing wrong).
Now that you have determined what and who's feedback will help you now let's discuss how to deal with negative feedback. It really boils down to the fact that if you want to do something at the start you are very likely to be bad at it, so at least at first (and potentially for a while) you will get little positive feedback on your work from those who are not very close to you and this is ok. Additionally some people are just mean, there are many different reasons for that which I won't get into but just know that you are trying your best and if your goal is to keep getting better and improve then you are going to get there so in a couple months time you're going to be better than the person that got that bad feedback and a few months after that it could even be that what that person said is now completely irrelevant, it's all about keeping it up. Also remember that sometimes things get lost in translation, people can say something that means something completely different to you from their intention. I always try to take anything that I can use from feedback, positive or negative, and sometimes that does mean looking for a needle in a haystack but if you are looking to improve without becoming disheartened sometimes it's necessary.
In the end feedback is crucial to your development, as an artist you need to create for yourself, but to see success in today's world you do need to learn what works for other people and feedback is a great way of finding that information out. Put yourself out there, keep improving and don't let any negativity get to you!
See you next post!
Ross