The Impostor in my Studio - A well-known syndrome

My studio in Curepipe, Mauritius

There is a particular silence in the studio after I finish a painting. For a moment, I see only what is in front of me; the colours, the dark little marks, the patterns I have spent more than twenty years learning to make. And then another voice arrives, quieter and colder than the first. "This is not real art", it says. "You are not a real artist. There is an impostor in my studio, and this is a well-known syndrome! One day, someone will stand in front of this canvas and finally tell you the truth."

And I dread this day.

I have lived with that voice for most of my life. It does not concern itself with money. What it attacks is something harder to measure: the worth of the work as art. When I see other painters' exhibitions, beautifully lit, written about, taken seriously, the voice tells me I have no business hanging my paintings on the same kind of wall. It tells me I am different from the contemporary art world, and that this difference is a verdict. It tells me the safest thing I could do is to close the studio's door, stay inside, and never come out of it again.

If you are reading this and any of it sounds familiar, I want to tell you something: I have had to learn slowly and keep relearning that this feeling has a name, it is astonishingly common, and some of the artists I admire most carried it their entire lives.

A feeling with a name

Psychologists call it impostor syndrome. The term comes from a 1978 study by Pauline Clance and Suzanne Imes, who noticed that many creative people were privately convinced they had fooled everyone around them, and that exposure was only a matter of time. The cruel detail is that no amount of evidence settles it. Praise gets explained away as politeness. A sale becomes luck. A good review becomes a misunderstanding that will eventually be corrected. The accomplishments pile up, and the doubt simply learns to climb higher.

It turns out that the people most likely to feel like frauds are often the ones doing the most original work, precisely because original work has no template to measure itself against. If you are making something that looks like everyone else's, you can at least tell yourself you are doing it "correctly." If you are making something that looks like no one else's, there is no rulebook to reassure you. There is only the doubt, and the next canvas.

Painting in my studio

The painters who felt it too

When the voice in my studio is loudest, I think about Vincent van Gogh. He is one of my great influences, and reading his letters to his brother Theo is like reading a diary of some of my own worst days. He worked in near-total obscurity. He was treated as mad. He doubted, constantly, whether he was a painter at all. And yet, in one letter from 1883, he wrote the sentence I keep coming back to:

"If you hear a voice within you say 'you cannot paint,' then by all means paint, and that voice will be silenced."

Read that again. He is not pretending the voice does not exist. He knows it intimately that it is his own voice. What he understood is that the only thing that quiets it is the work itself. Not waiting until you feel worthy. Not earning permission first. You paint because the voice says you cannot, and the painting is the answer.

Georgia O'Keeffe, who built one of the most singular bodies of work of the twentieth century, put it even more plainly:

"I've been absolutely terrified every moment of my life, and I've never let it keep me from doing a single thing I wanted to do."

I find that line enormously comforting, because she does not promise the fear ever leaves. She says only that she refused to let it decide for her. The terror and the work coexisted, side by side, for a lifetime.

And it is not only painters. The writer and poet Maya Angelou published book after celebrated book, and still she said:

"I have written eleven books, but each time I think, 'Uh-oh, they're going to find out now. I've run a game on everybody, and they're going to find me out.'"

Eleven books. The same dread, every single time. If she never escaped that feeling, then perhaps the feeling is not a reliable witness. Perhaps it is just the weather, something that passes through the studio and moves on, leaving the work untouched.

When "not belonging" was the whole point

The other thing the voice tells me is that I do not fit the contemporary art world, and that this is something to be ashamed of. But the history of art is largely a history of people who did not fit and who were eventually celebrated for exactly the qualities that once excluded them.

When Henri Matisse and his circle showed their wild, unnaturally bright canvases in Paris in 1905, a critic dismissed them as fauves - "wild beasts." It was an insult. Today, "Fauvism" is a movement studied in many art schools, and that bright, fearless colour is one of the categories my own work is described through. A few decades earlier, "Impressionist" had also begun as a sneer, taken from a critic mocking Monet for painting an unfinished-looking impression rather than a proper picture. The label we now say with reverence started as ridicule aimed at artists who refused to paint the accepted way.

I think about this often, because two of my own influences sat firmly outside the establishment of their time. Friedensreich Hundertwasser was treated by much of the art world as an eccentric and an outsider, a man who rejected the straight line and the grey rules of modernism and whose joyful, pattern-rich vision now feels decades ahead of its moment. Aboriginal Australian art, which moves me deeply, was for a long time dismissed by Western institutions as "craft" rather than "art," until the world slowly came to understand it had been looking at one of the oldest and most profound visual traditions on earth.

There is one form of this doubt that has its own particular sting for me: I never went to fine art school. I have no diploma, no professors who vouch for me, no years spent in a studio under someone's correction. When I stand among artists who studied their craft formally, the voice tells me I skipped a step everyone else completed, that I am only pretending to belong in a conversation I was never properly admitted to. But the history of painting is full of people who never sat in those classrooms. Henri Rousseau, now revered as the great master of Naïve art, was completely self-taught. He worked for years as a customs officer and taught himself to paint by copying in the museums of Paris; the establishment mocked his "childlike" canvases, yet it was precisely his lack of academic training that gave him a style no school could have produced. Van Gogh had almost no formal instruction. Frida Kahlo had none at all. What none of them had was a teacher's permission, and it turned out they did not need one.

So when I feel that my Zafer style does not belong alongside the cool, conceptual work I see in the big fairs, I try to remember what that feeling means. Not "you are inferior." More often: "Maybe perhaps you are early ?" The distinctiveness that makes me feel like an outsider is not a flaw in the work. It is the work.

Dodo in the jungle - 2024

What I am learning to do with the doubt

I have not defeated impostor syndrome, and I have stopped expecting to. I no longer believe there is a finish line where the doubt evaporates and I finally feel like a "real" artist. Instead, I am learning to live alongside it without handing it the keys to the studio. A few things help me.

I separate the feeling from the fact. The thought "my art has no value" is a feeling, not a measurement. The canvas in front of me does not change its quality depending on my mood. Twenty years of practice, a style that is genuinely my own, a subject matter like the dodo, Le Morne, the seascapes, the Mauritian houses, the cane fields, the mountains that no one else paints the way I do, those are facts, and they help me carry on during bad times.

I let other people hold the evidence I cannot. When a collector buys a piece, or when someone from abroad tells me a painting brought happiness to their place, that is real comfort about my work's worth. The impostor voice insists I discard it. I am learning, instead, to write it down and keep it. I often ask collectors to send me photos of my paintings on their walls, and I look at them in times of doubt.

And above all, I keep showing the work. The deepest temptation of this feeling is the one I described at the start: to retreat into the studio and never come out, where no one can judge and nothing can fail. But art that is never shown cannot do the one thing art is for: to reach someone. Hiding does not protect the work. It only ensures the work never lives.

So I hang it on the wall, beside other artists, in spite of the voice or perhaps because of it. I send it out into the world. And every time I do, I think of Van Gogh's instruction. The voice says you cannot. The brush, again and again, must be my reply.

If you are a painter, a writer, a maker of any kind, and you are reading this from inside your own studio with that same cold voice for company, I hope you will take this as your permission slip, though you never needed one. You are not an impostor. You are an artist who is paying attention.

Now go and make the next thing, and let that voice be silenced.