Atychiphobia

“Atychiphobia” is a 10-foot by 6.5-foot oil on canvas painting. It is an abstract map of over 100 gradients intersecting one another. On top of which I place green painters’ tape in various locations, lengths and forms. This painting represents my fear of failure. This follows me everywhere. The anxiety I get from not producing perfection in all that I do almost keeps me from doing anything at all. Even in the process of making a painting, I am frozen at the start. Afraid to begin because I may make an error. My process begins by painting the gradients first. Piece by piece each gradient takes at least an hour to perfect. Over months of effort, the shattered gradients finally came together, but I struggled with the fact that I could find small mistakes all throughout. I desperately wanted perfection and so I wanted to cover these mistakes. Originally, I was planning on making this one about my fear of snakes, or some other tangible fear. But as I was about to put brush to canvas, I once again froze. I did not want to mess up the gradients I worked on for months, I just couldn’t bring myself to do it out of the fear that I would mess it up. Instead, I use painters’ tape, the same tape I used to create the shapes in the painting, to cover up or frame each mistake that I could find in my work. Hanging in different forms to create three dimensionality to the piece and in some cases offering a window into what I might consider a mistake. They served as a temporary band-aid for the parts I so desperately did not want people to see. In contrast the mistakes become emphasized; made bigger than what they were before. Tempting the audience to rip the tape off to see what’s underneath.