I don't know if others look at paintings on POL or elsewhere, and bemoan their own inadequacies by comparison; complain to themselves that they're not as good as - well, let's say Charles Wilby, or Alan Owen; and fear they never will be. (Never will be Wilby - I like that...) Frankly, I do that now and then - I compare one of my watercolours, for instance, all of which are essentially brush drawings with precious little thought-out build-up - with other paintings and find myself sadly lacking. But let us, in the immortal words of Red Dwarf's Lister, flag down a taxi and head for Real Street here - I have no idea at all if I could do the sort of painting, by Charles and Alan, by Óskar Thorarensson, by Rupert Cordeux, that I admire so much; on the whole, I think probably not. On the other hand - I'm not trying to; it's one thing to approach a piece of paper determined to paint like someone else, but when it comes right down to it, and I pick up a brush and mix up a bit of paint, all that goes right out of the window - of course I want to get better, but I want to get better at what I do, not what somebody else has done. I wonder too if when we're painting - as opposed to thinking about painting - we do actually try to paint "well" - or rather, get immersed in the process and interested in what's happening on the paper or canvas. Of course, if you're consciously copying someone else's work you will try to emulate brush strokes, colour mixes and composition - but even then, the unexpected happens, especially in watercolour .... and you take a little wander up the garden path; your own garden path. I'm going to give up this comparing myself with others and finding myself wanting; if one of my paintings is bad, it'll be because I've not met my own expectations or standards, not because I've fallen short of someone else's. The next step is to stop worrying whether something is working out or not long before I could reasonably expect to be confident of that one way or the other .... this could take a while. But these little demons of self-doubt need to be eradicated one by one, as they appear; I've never yet met a painter, by the way, who didn't get troubled by them; other than the painfully self-satisfied, of course - who usually aren't very good by anyone's standards.