As an artist in any field, do you cringe at your early work?

I draw porn and do 3d modelling. And yes, when I see work from the beginning I am like “dear gods, that sucks ass”.

No,in fact it makes me smile.I can see technical mistakes.but what I like about my earlier work is that it had a certain earnestness to it :)I have drawing from when I was 2 years old ;)ps-I didn’t know you did any artwork,Morgan :)

Some of it makes me want to hide it in a vault to protect humanity. Others are a pleasant trip down memory lane.

I wouldn’t call myself an artist by any stretch of the word but whatever older works I have created do have some sort of unrecreatable charm to them, like a child’s drawing. If one tries to draw cutesy and awkward it will just look bad, I’m not really sure how to word it… :x

I don’t cringe at it, but I can absolutely see a change in style.

The old stuff is horrible. The older it gets, the worse it is. But it shows how much I’ve learned along the way.

In one instance I never would’ve imagined, I looked at some newspaper columns I wrote in 1990, but I couldn’t read them because I set the type so small. I was younger with better eyes, and a lot more stupid then.

Well, generally I don’t, in the sense that whatever I did back then was good enough at the time, and I generally don’t tend to listen to old stuff. But I heard my 2003 album tonight after several years and there was this one song where I thought “what the hell was I thinking?” because everything is really out of tune, including my voice, and it needed some heavy remastering. At the time the producer and sound engineer insisted on working on it some more, but I insisted it was good enough. Turns out they were right and I wasn’t. The other 13 songs on the album sounded ok though, and in some cases I felt proud/nostalgic/lucky to have done them.

Yes, some of the photos I was proud of when I got started are pretty bad now that I’ve started to really figure out what I’m doing. And I’m certain that some of the stuff I do now will haunt me later. It’s just the learning process.

My old diaries are the worst, though. I’ve read back through them and have a strong desire to burn them, but I can’t bring myself to do it.

I cringe at my later work too. It seems that there have been odd successes along the way and certainly some progress but a lot of peaks and mainly valleys.

I’m a fiber artist. The first yarn I spun was all chunky and thin, all amateurish, just like the stereotypical “homespun” stuff sold by some yarn mills. (Good handspinners don’t make yarn that looks that lumpy unless they’re doing it on purpose.) Heck yeah, it makes me laugh. :)

I’ve been crocheting since age 7 and knitting since 20something, and the differences there are apparent too. I used to make little dollhouse “rugs” and potholders a lot. Heh.

Drawing, painting: I cringe at all of it. I like it for five minutes, then hate it and tolerate it forever. I’ll still smile while I look at it, but I despise it.
Fibers: Don’t talk shit about my knits. They’re my babies and I love them.
Literary type stuff: I don’t expect anyone to get it. So I don’t give a fuck. Usually I either hate it or don’t know how to feel about it.

Not really I like everything I have done. However other people are the ones who have the things I have created. Haven’t seen them in years….who knows I might cringe at some,
only if I missed something I should have seen. The heart of it still remains.

Yes, I cringe at nearly everything I do, period.

I second @frdelrosario

My work has gotten generally better with every year (with some exceptions here & there). Looking back at the old stuff makes it very apparent. It makes me proud of how far I’ve come and it makes me realize that I shouldn’t be so hard on my current self – my current self is head & shoulders above where my old self was.

I don’t cringe though because that’s all I knew at the time – I did the best I could with the tools and knowledge I had at the time and alot of gusto in my heart.

I came from a family of artists. My father was a bronze sculptor. I began drawing obcessively at a very young age and my father insisted that I keep all my drawings in sketchbooks. So, I did. I managed to keep every single one of them and to this day, I look back at my old sketchwork and finished drawings. It’s a chronology of my life growing up and I have no reason to “cringe” because the more I drew, the more observant I became. I could see a progression of constant improvement and still do from day to day.

Oh yes!!!! My first paintings are no longer on the walls, every ‘new’ one is just better, prettier than the one before…... Same with my jewellry, the ones I have made first no longer exists, they were ‘re-created’ into much prettier ones…..

I do like @RubyReds ideas. I’ve often taken old drawings and paintings, ripped them into shreds and made collages or just painted over them. I think that’s still progression and improvement in an ironic sense.