This is one of my favorite phrases and concepts that I came away with from art school. I believe it was Caitlin Mitchell Dayton, a great teacher and mentor at the San Francisco Art Institute, that first told me of this phrase and I really took it to heart.

As an artist it is extremely easy to feel precious about every piece of artwork you make. It is your baby after all. You birthed it and gave it life and have complete control over all the aspects of it (though I’d hope you aren’t as controlling over a human baby), but being too precious can really hurt an art process.

So here are a few babies that I have let live and few that haven’t been so lucky so far in the Aferro Studios.

This painting is a great example of not being precious. The paper had originally been a not very thought out painting that just wasn’t working out. I rolled it up and put it away and when I moved into Aferro it took on a new life as this not yet titled painting.

The beginning stages of a piece in a separate series from the above painting.

This piece is a good example of needing to just let go. The more I tried to salvage this piece the worst it got. I did learn some technical things from it though.

These two pieces were supposed to be brought up together to create some sort of conversation, but they both fell by the way side. Something may still come of them, but the best thing about them is they led me to my newest piece.

This is a new born baby that is still being thought out. We’ll see if she survives or not.

Sometimes you just have to kill those babies.