I live in northern Maine. It has been brutally cold here this winter and we're on the verge of breaking the record for annual snow accumulation. A few days ago, however, we were afforded a brief respite from the sub-zero temperatures and snowfall and I siezed the opportunity to go for a walk. I thought about the seemingly countless hours that I spent, especially during the first eight or nine years that I've lived here, trekking around the landscape within a three mile radius of my house, in all manner of weather, laden with a sketchbook or drawing board and a backpack filled with drawing materials, until I would eventually stop in some field or woods and attempt to translate what I was looking at into some kind of visual form. I was trying to make art. More often than not, however, I failed. I would occasionally end up with a really great drawing or painting or a sketch that I would later develop into a successful image. I've posted a lot of them here on this blog over the past ten years and many of the best paintings and drawings ended up in the hands of collectors, thus enabling me to continue to pursue my passion.
But the majority of the work that I did made it's way, sooner or later, into the landfill.
During my struggles to turn my experiences into visual form, I learned a great deal about drawing, composition, color mixing, paint application and how to manipulate art materials in a way that creates the illusion of solid form, light and atmospheric space, on a flat surface. I also learned many other important lessons such as how to keep an easel from blowing away in the wind, not to use oil paint outdoors during black fly season, to always spray the pastel fixative downwind, thunderstorms move faster than I can run, and to be polite to the Border Patrol agents whenever they feel the need to interrogate me. But the most important lesson that I learned was about both the inevitability and the necessity of failure. Despite my best efforts and my extensive training, sometimes the work just isn't going to be successful. This is no reflection on my "talent" or lack thereof but, rather, an integral part of the creative process which involves taking risks, pushing beyond the boundaries of our technical and theoretical abilities and trusting our instincts. In so doing, we give up a great deal of control over the final outcome and we risk failure, but the payoff is that, sometimes, we surprise ourselves with wonderful work that comes from a place that our intellect does not have access to.
If you are involved in any kind of creative endeavor, it's imperative that you allow yourself the freedom to fail. Rather than letting the fear of failure inhibit you from working, you should embrace the fear and work as much as possible. When we force ourselves to go outside our comfort zones, real learning and real creativity happen.
I estimate that I've spent over 10,000 hours, with art supplies at hand, out in the landscape around my home since moving to Maine in 2006. Although a significant percentage of that time was spent walking, absorbing the colors and light, sounds and smells, and the history of the landscape, the bulk of the time was spent pushing pastels or charcoal or graphite or oil paint around on a sheet of paper or canvas, in the hopes of pulling a cohesive image out of the Æther. If I were to compare the amount of time that I spent to the number of actual finished works of art that I created, I might easily dismay. But it was time well spent. Not only did I learn myriad methods of successfully transforming mere art materials into physical manifestations of the visceral experiences I was having, I learned just about every conceivable way of failing to do that.
During all of those thousands of hours, I thought I was trying to make art, but what I was really trying to do was to make an artist.
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