As we said earlier, the artwork reflects the personality of the artist. In many cases, artists emotionally identify with their art, and if their art gets criticized, they feel hurt personally.
If your artist friend is like that, you can support them by helping them understand that their personal worth doesn’t stem from the quality of their artwork.
As an artist, it’s important to learn to mentally and emotionally separate yourself from the art you create. Defining your self-worth through criticizable visual output is bound to cause problems.
Explain to your artist friend that their human worth is separate from the art they create. Oftentimes, it can be a good idea that you both make a list of your intrinsic values in life.
By that I mean you write down your personal priorities of what matters to you most. These can be things like honesty, authenticity, genuine relationships, trust, loyalty, etc.
Once you are done, you can compare your lists and speak about them.
Most likely, it will turn out that ‘making art that everybody likes’ is not a priority of your artist friend. Oftentimes, this is all it takes for your pal to understand that their art is nothing to do with their own worthiness.