One Step Forward, Three Days Back

Either I'm doing something very wrong with my art process or I should just stop listening to people. Not everyone, naturally.

I went into the studio all fired up and ready to tackle what I had going on only to end up falling back down to where I was a few days ago. Frustrated and unable to figure out what to do.

Long story short, my current challenge is to take the eight pictures and present them in a more polished and finished fashion. My tactic is to go about the whole presenting the portraits as if they are the portraits that are sitting on the shelf above the computer I'm at right now. But I simply cannot clean up the images in photoshop, print them on photo paper, frame them, and call them done. Apparently, there needs to be more.

And the more I tweak with it, the more I end up messing things up. I'm about at the point where I'm ready to say screw it and just do what I want to do even if they don't like it. Because at the rate I'm going with all the talking to teachers about ideas, I'm not producing a damn thing anymore.

I've effectively nullified my installation.
I've edited a one-and-three-quarter inch thick stack of drawings to eight.
I've done almost all of the suggestions they gave me at every critique.

And I've made no headway.

I don't know what the department wants from me anymore short of what is spelled out for me in the syllabus. I feel I have met those goals, but they feel like I haven't. I'm slowly becoming my fear. I'm not going to graduate in December at this rate. I may not graduate at all if I can't do anything right.