Just a bit more musing and mulling about the problems and pitfalls of this painting lark. I have just posted a painting which I confess to be a bit iffy about. One of the comments suggests that ladies, in particular, suffer from a lack of confidence due to the effect their education had on them. Certainly in my day, girls were the second class students with boys taking all the accolades, but is that really the reason why I find it hard to keep my confidence level up with my painting. I began to wonder how much confidence affects the overall results when painting. I do see some paintings that seem to have been painted with gusto and a gung ho attitude and the result is that they give the viewer confidence in the confidence the artist had (if that makes sense). The paintings that seem a bit shaky on the confidence front make much more difficult viewing. I have noticed that when watching performers that if they are lacking in confidence and look a bit shaky, it makes the audience feel uneasy and find the act difficult to watch. You can then get someone, perhaps of lesser talent, who bowls onto a stage exuding huge confidence and the audience relaxes and enjoys the show. Is it the same with painting, I wonder? As a result of these thoughts, I had a trawl through the gallery and it surprised me that the paintings that drew my attention were the ones that I felt the artist was comfortable with their style, comfortable with their subject and had attacked it with - yes, you guessed - confidence. That's all very well though - what happens if you don't feel confident in your painting. I hold my hand up as a guilty party on that one. I was educated at a convent where the goal appeared to be to make the girls all feel guilty about everything and having any confidence in yourself was seen as a sin of pride. We didn't stand much hope really, did we? Perhaps my lack of confidence is due to me feeling that I can paint better than I actually can? If this is the case, then I am not going to be satisfied with anything I produce as my mind's eye has got me down as the next Picasso. So, is it about tailoring your expectations to match your ability? I would like to think that with each painting I move the bar up a little bit. Perhaps it is judging how far to move the bar up that causes the problem. Too big a leap usually equals disappointment with the results. Not moving it up at all leads to stagnant lack of progress. So how do you know how much to challenge yourself so that your confidence remains at a viable level, but you still move forward? I don't have an answer to that one as I seem to fall into the trap every time of thinking that the next painting will be the best I have ever done, which more often than not spells dissatisfaction and disappointment. Very occasionally (and I do mean very, very occasionally) I manage to turn out a painting that just goes right from the start and this in turns feeds my confidence as I go along and hey presto - the painting looks as if it has been confidently painted and looks in a different league to a lot of my others. So, the dilemma is - how to keep one's confidence up when you are trying to move forward? Anyone out there hold the clue?