I really major in self doubt.
Do I?
Oh yes, yes I do. I major in self doubt.
I think.
It boils down to wanting to do whatever it is I’m not doing. If I am dolling I want to be card making. If I am card making I want to be gardening.
I don’t have this feeling as much with gardening unless the task I have chosen to do will not fit in the allotted time and I exhaust myself.
Part of the problem is an inability to leave things half done, the other part of it is the amount of stuff that has to be brought out in order to achieve the goal.
I have just finished dressing four dolls, which required everything in the craft room pertaining to be loaded on to one small folding card table. If I push the stuff at the front backwards, something falls off the back of the table.
I also am guilty of buying more boxes to put stuff in, and then doing so, regardless of the fact that these will be extra boxes to scrabble through in the future.
I can’t imagine why I thought one entire wall of cupboards would be enough to put all the stuff away in.
Yes it is a version of hoarding, but it is the version of acquisition and never throwing anything away that enables me to make historically accurate clothing with miniature fabrics for most time periods in the last one and a half thousand years ish.
In Britain, I hasten to add, and certain close continental areas. If asked to do clothing and dolls for South America two hundred years ago I’d be off to the books or the Internet like anyone else. I have no idea what the people were like to doll them and haven’t a clue what they were dressed in. I haven’t read them up, visited museums or any other self educating activity connected.
One of the reasons for the self doubt is that it is all inside my head. Not only the knowledge of what people looked like in terms of stature, and appearance but what they were wearing, how it fastened what it was made of and, most of all, how to reproduce it in miniature.
To make clothing in the local location and time frame required, everything comes out and I know, more or less where everything is and what to do with it.
I have tried tidying up, it’s fatal. By the time I know where everything is again the boxes are back, perilously stacked.
There are doll makers, who, I know because I’ve interviewed them, make a small range time frame product using patterns, tried and tested methods and the same dolls from commercial moulds so everything fits.
That must be great and I wish I did that. I couldn’t do two dolls the same if my life depended on it.
I do believe increasingly that what I am doing might be art, it is certainly a load of one-offs.
And the card making is also individual. They might be similar, I might get an idea and follow it through in every possible iteration, but there will never be two identical. Even the 80+ Christmas cards are individual, though similar.
Herein lies the doubt.
If you do the same thing repeatedly, whether a doll, a card, a garment, a flower bed, whatever, you can get good at it. The repetition builds confidence, you know you can do it because you’ve done it before.
And there is no doubt that other branches of art, such as picture painting, do honour the repetitive style of certain known artists. There is a school of thought that says a Turner is a Turner because it looks like a Turner.
When writing for the magazines I came to the conclusion that sudden fame was a dangerous thing. Artists becoming known for one thing, such as for example, a miniature chair, were fossilized before they had time to develop their skills because everyone wanted one exactly the same. By the three hundredth chair, you probably could make one with your eyes closed.
But is that art? Surely that is what factories are for, not artists.
So the self doubt remains.
Probably.
With it remain the days to clear one activity away and get out all the stuff for the next one which I may or may not be able to do when I get everything out or not. Along with that the worry. When I have retrieved everything appropriate will I still be able to do it?
I treasure boredom. It is rare around here.
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