The Growth Plateau

Susan has been an exceptional student in my art classes.

Her excitement for learning pushed me to sharpen how I teach. She was deeply engaged—beaming with intelligence and energy—as she neared retirement and dove into painting, drawing, and seeing for the first time.

She was on fire—and it was earned.

She put in the time and focused intently on the joy of making art.

Every lesson, she strengthened her skills.

I couldn’t believe how quickly her brain integrated color, brushstrokes, and composition. Her paintings began to develop a consistent style—painterly, almost van Gogh-like.

She worked at her own pace—slower—but when I glanced at her, she was transfixed (when she wasn’t chatting—we attract the most wonderful, smart, social folks in our art classes).

She took two classes a week, practiced during the day, and even sent me screenshots for feedback.

She became the standard by which I quietly measured what was possible.

Then things changed.

She no longer sparkled in class. No more beams of learning and connection.

She looked tired. Even bored.

My heart sank.

I reached out—asked questions, tried to unpack what was going on.

“I’m just doing too much.” “Not getting enough sleep.”

All reasonable explanations. I felt I had failed her.

There was something deeper to understand—something I needed to name and understand if I was going to help her, and others like her.

Over the past few weeks, I found research pointing to Susan’s experience being predictable and normal.

No quick fix. But worth it for all of us, encore emerging artists.

Turns out, Susan had hit a normal part of the learning process—one that almost every passionate beginner hits—

At the beginning, everything can seem seamless, fun, and easy.

You improve fast. You surprise yourself. You feel a kind of glee—like learning to ride a bike—it’s intoxicating.

Momentum. Energy. You feel seen by the creative gods.

And then—something shifts.

It’s like a WHACK—hitting a wall of no fun.

The work feels harder. Much harder.

Finishing a painting can feel like pushing a Sisyphus boulder uphill.

You often find reasons not to practice, not to come to class.

Your work isn’t getting better—it’s staying the same. It can feel unfair—the art-making results feel flat, off, and frustrating.

The opposite of motivating.

You’ve hit an uncomfortable gap.

A Growth Plateau.

It’s a gap between what you can now see as an emerging artist and what you can actually do.

You now know how to see, how to evaluate—but your skills haven’t caught up yet.

As Ira Glass puts it:

“The gap between taste and skill is something everyone goes through… it is normal to take a while to catch up.”

What’s Actually Happening

Early on, your art-making progress is fast and visible.

You begin to see and learn how to make a drawing look like what you’re observing. You begin to understand the essential art elements—color, balance, and proportion.

Before taking the classes and absorbing so much, you couldn’t see the problems.

Now you see them everywhere.

Your eye has leveled up.

But your skills haven’t caught up yet.

And so—the gap widens.

Fun can diminish, and you can feel stuck. Guilt can ooze and fester when your super encouraging teacher notices your stuckness and tries to help you pass this stage.

It Feels Disorienting

The loss of that early “flow high” can shake your confidence.

Then, our smart brain can start rationalizing:

“Why am I wasting my time?” “I’m not meant to be an artist.” “This was fun—but now it feels silly, I should focus on something else.”

This gap can feel so demotivating.

Psychology calls part of this the Dunning-Kruger effect—as you learn more, you become more aware of what you don’t know.

In art making—

You can see so clearly what you want to make. You just can’t make it yet.

Friction—not a positive reinforcing feeling.

But something deeper is happening (cue happy intro from an orchestra’s string section):

You’re moving from the fun of discovery to the satisfaction of learning art.

This next phase, however, ushers in a different kind of joy:

Solving problems
Seeing more clearly
Making something actually work deeply

It’s slower. It may not feel as “fun” or easy. It requires more awareness, more intention.

But ultimately (cue: release, happy, full orchestra), it can bring a kind of joy that is hard to describe: meeting your artistic self in a deeper, more honest way.

The Growth Plateau doesn’t remove the joy. It asks you to find it in a new place.

Solutions: Do You Need a Break?

It’s tempting to step away for a long time. But research shows something more nuanced:

Short breaks help. Long breaks usually don’t.

Learning doesn’t only happen while you’re working— It continues during rest.

Long breaks (weeks, months) don’t build skill. Often, they mean not coming back.

Short breaks help the brain replay and consolidate what you’ve practiced.

That’s why you step away—and suddenly see what wasn’t working.

Don’t muscle through it.

The Solution Is Not to Work Harder

Most people try to push through this growth plateau by doing more:

More effort. More repetition.

My own experience as an artist and teacher, and the research, show us that hard work fixes will not get us through the plateau.

The solution is a shift in how we work:

It requires more pausing to understand what the art needs next.

Often, there are specific skills to learn—and habits to unlearn.

For example, in my own work:

Midway through a painting, I would often stop looking at my reference photo—the very thing that grounded my original vision. I would get lost in the feedback loop and joy of being in the flow of painting—with the concomitant overworking, repainting, pushing until exhaustion.

My paintings lost coherence. They became muddy, overworked, so frustrating!

How to Move Through It

Identify the real problem Drawing? Vision? Value? Color? Proportion? No reference photo? No thumbnail plan?
Practice deliberately Multiple small studies, one focus.
Get specific feedback Break the “just get it done” habit.
Use constraints (like a limited time frame or color palette) Limit, simplify, challenge.
Recognize and normalize these feelings and thoughts

Art making can become hard and frustrating. It did for me.

Many beginning artists stop taking classes and practicing precisely when they hit this growth plateau.

But this moment—this exact moment—is not a sign of failure.

It is a beautiful threshold for us emerging artists.