Ugly Art

There is inevitably going to come a time when you make something, and no matter what you do to it to try and make it better, you utterly LOATHE it. It happens.

When I was about six, I was attempting to draw a ballerina and, well, it was not good. I wanted elegance and grace. What I got was a polywog person with no neck. I was inconsolable. It was a miserable failure and I was crushed to my tiny little soul. I threw a massive temper tantrum. I made my mother draw a ballerina for me to restore beauty to the world. That failure still haunts me decades later! I wish I could tell you that my mother soothed me with some ancient and eternal wisdom which I will now pass on to you. Nope. She just drew me something I could not yet achieve, so I'd shut up. But when I was deemed old enough to be trusted with a human anatomy for artists book some years later, you better believe I worked at understanding how to depict the human body in motion.

There is rarely a week that goes by when I don't think about this. My mother has kept nearly all my art from my early childhood to the present, and I have kept nearly all of my children's art. No one starts out as their personal idea of "good" at anything, but when I sift backward through the years of accumulated art, I see the development of skill as well as evidence of the natural aptitudes that were there all along. That's why we practice little things over and over again, then gradually we practice more complex things over and over again. It gets us closer to where we want to be. I can totally draw a ballerina that satisfies my sense of aesthetics now.

Not unrelated to all this drama was my decision to name my company Circle Dot Line.

When I was first teaching my children to draw, I told them a deceptively simple truth of art: everything is a circle, a dot, a line, or some combination of the three to make more complex shapes. That's it. That's all there is to it. And to learn to draw, that is where you start. Train your eyes to see the circles, dots, and lines. Train your hands to make the circles, dots, and lines. Practice it. Allow yourself to play while doing it. Your results are going to have a lot to do with your practice and how intensely you play.

We all make things we hate. Sometimes we hate them because they are not as skilled and polished as we might wish, and we need more practice to realize what is living in our heads. Sometimes we hate them because they are recognizably in our own unique style but we like someone else's style better. It is important to learn to separate the two. You can do something about skill, you cannot be somebody else.

So what do we do with that perceived failure? "Learn from it" is one obvious and cliche answer and not always realistic. We sometimes learn nothing. If it is a good failure, firmly on the road to someplace Better, I keep it. A lot of those live in my personal portfolio. Those are the ones I learn from. If it is really just bad and embarrassing, I tear it up and use it in papier mache. Or maybe I paint over it...reimagine it as abstract art. Turn it into something new. This is a practice as old as art. Art museums are full of masterpieces painted over lesser works.

Ultimately, art is a safe place to fail. No one dies if I choose a color palette that does not work, but I sure do learn a lot about myself. Specifically, that I love art more than I fear failing at art.

I hope that you find something you love more than you fear failure.