Pushing Beyond Peak Ugly

What can you learn as you push beyond your 'peak ugly'?

For a while now, I've recognised that my pictures often go through a life-cycle that includes a point I call 'Peak Ugly'. Vaguely analogous to the 'trough of despair", Peak Ugly is the point where I loose faith in the image, the idea, my ability, and it looks awful and I just want to give up - no... you know what? The sensible thing to do would be to give up! And do you know what? OF COURSE I DO NOT GIVE UP.

Firstly I've come to understand that I can get through peak ugly to something I'm quite pleased with, and secondly peak ugly is when I LEARN and grow as an artist.

This image is called "Beyond Euclid", and is very weird, and was inspired by reading "Gödel, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid", as recommended by the awesome Mike Truty. It spent a long time in Peak Ugly, and you might argue it never left, but I'm excited by how different it is from my other (more pasteurised) work, and I wouldn't have got there without pushing on.

So next time you reach peak ugly with a project, don't give up, push on and you might find you can also have a weird picture of two fish biting each other's faces in a potentially sexual way. Or you might have a new strategy for world domination. Who knows if you don't give up?