On the Other Side of Excitement

Artist Ernest Strickland with Facilitator Mehri Davis at Art Outside the Lines, Columbus, Ohio, USA

Excitement is the emotional cousin of nervous. Both rush in with adrenaline, both stir us up, and both can tempt us to stop short. Nervousness can hold someone back from beginning; excitement can make someone think they’ve already arrived.

But practice begins on the other side of that adrenaline. A creative practice is not just about capturing sparks - it’s about learning how to articulate the experience you want to inhabit. What do I want this work to let me feel, see, or discover? What do I want to explore in myself or in the world through this act of making?

For many, this kind of articulation doesn’t come easily. It asks us to order our own information, to choose direction, to lead our own experience. This agency to decide or shape how we engage with the world is powerful and vital for everyone.

This is where finishing enters the picture - not as endless tinkering, but as another form of articulation. To recognize that a work, or a version of an idea, has reached its end is a skill in itself. It’s the ability to say: this is what I wanted to experience, and I’ve reached it. That recognition allows us to enjoy the moment, release the work, and let it inform what comes next.

Questions like when can it be better? and when is it ready to release? are not distractions - they are muscles to be practiced. They are elements in our personal vocabulary, ways we learn to craft and describe our actions to ourselves. They help build trust in one’s own sense of completion just as much as in one’s sense of beginning.

For facilitating artists in supported studios, this is the heart of the work. They help artists celebrate the spark of excitement by linking it with the sensation of exploration. They support the ongoing practice of articulation - encouraging someone to define for themselves what they want to experience, to recognize when they’ve reached it, and to trust that moving on is not an ending but an opening.

Excitement will always have its necessary place -it reminds us why we make, why we return, why we risk. But practice invites us to carry it further, into the space where trust, agency, and articulation grow into lasting forms of expression.