How Do You Find Solutions To Your Problems?

The Finished Piece

Do you ever find yourself stumped?

When you have a problem be it creative, work or relationship related and you can’t quite figure out how to get past it?

I was recently stumped with a painting I thought I had finished two months previously. There was something that made me feel unsettled about it.  I knew it wasn’t quite right but I just couldn’t figure out what it was.

Every day this painting - below far left - stared at me, yet I still couldn’t work out what I could do to improve it. 

But then, I thought maybe I was coming at it from the wrong angle. Maybe I needed to move away from finding a solution and instead take some kind of intermediate step.

Now all I needed to figure out was what that step was.

While I sat, staring at this painting, trying to figure out this next step my thoughts turned to my power sander. I’d bought it 5 months previously but hadn’t used it. Just had it sitting there gathering dust.

So I took the painting outside. I plugged in the sander and got to work.

Admittedly, I didn’t really know what I was doing - I hadn’t ever used a power sander - but I liked the idea of using one. 

As my pieces are often layered very thickly with paint I quickly found that this style lent itself to the power of the whirring abrasive sandpaper disc. The power sanding quickly uncovered surprises as it removed multiple layers of paint. 

 I carried on sanding away the parts of the painting I wasn’t in love with.  I’d taken a leap of faith working in this way - did I mention I didn’t know what I was doing?

But it paid off.

After I’d finished with the sander I knew what I was left with was far from perfect - in fact, it was worse than before I’d even started. But now I could see possibilities for how I could improve on it.

I’ve found that this kind of situation doesn’t just occur within my artwork. In fact, it plays out in many different ways in everyday life.

Sometimes, when I’ve tried to force a decision that wasn’t clear it’s because I didn’t have enough information. I needed to stall the decision until I had all the information. Other times I’m fixated on a narrowly defined problem and not looking at it from different angles.

In this case, I wasn’t expanding my thinking on how to approach the problem. All I could think about was how I could add more layers on top of a painting I believed I could improve. 

The real change only happened when I began thinking about removing the parts I wasn’t in love with and then rebuilding. In this case, and probably in many others, I needed to go backwards in order to move forwards.

Have you found yourself in a similar situation? How did you work your way around it?

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