On mistakes and masterpieces
and how there's hope for all of us
Hello friends
I’ve been making an awful lot of mistakes in the studio lately.
The painting I’m working on is proving…recalcitrant. It’s a truanting thing. It keeps getting away from me. I keep thinking it’s done but then I see that it’s not. It’s a sulky presence in my studio. So am I. Dammit, I’ve been cranky!
I thought it was done on Friday. Hooray! But something in me knew it wasn’t right. Not yet.
I just finished reading “Where the Heart Beats: John Cage, Zen Buddhism and the Inner Life of Artists” by Kay Larson, and can highly recommend it. Apart from the wonderful insight it offers into Cage’s approach to creative practice as a spiritual path, it struck me just how wide a field of influence Cage had and continues to have. Visual artists were particularly drawn to his ideas. One such was the painter Pat Steir, best known for her monumental “Waterfall’ paintings.
Confounded by my many mistakes in the studio and casting about for inspiration and guidance, I watched a documentary on her and her work. She’s in her mid-eighties now, ascerbic, tough, and entirely comfortable with her own significance as an artist. (At one point she drily comments that a woman artist must basically outlive all her male contemporaries before anyone will take her seriously.)
Her work is stunning. In tune with Cage’s ideas of chance, she allows gravity and the various viscosities of liquid paint as it flows down her enormous canvases, to create complex, intricate, gorgeous paintings built up from many layers of falling sheets and long drips of colour. This is art that will take you as deep as you are prepared to go with it.
There’s a deft control of her materials here, to be sure, but also an acceptance that she isn’t always the one in charge. Here’s what she said about one particular painting and its making:
“I never could have done that if I had planned it. The mistake makes the painting. The misjudgement, the miscalculation, and if you correct the mistake with another mistake it makes a masterpiece. One mistake corrected correctly, then it’s…a wreck. But a mistake corrected with another misunderstanding, another mistake…this is my favourite painting.”
Mistakes introduce new directions. They make room for the unplanned, the unforeseen. Mistakes are new ideas in disguise.
In “Trust the Process: An artist’s guide to letting go” Shaun MacNiff writes:
“The mistake is outside the intended course of action, and it may present something we never saw before, something unexpected or contradictory, an accident that can be put to use….Mistakes break the continuities of intentions with slips and distortions.
The mistake is a message that calls for attention.”
McNiff notices that the anger we feel when we make a mistake can release a new burst of energy. Sheer frustration can lead us to break with ways of working that have become dull and constrictive, and dismantle a tired pattern in order to make something new.
We can find a new boldness after a mistake. A kind of nothing-to-lose bravado can arise. The worst has already happened, so what the hell. Spontanaeity can return.
Creative work requires us to be able to harness not just the physical materials but also the many feelings that so often arise, including frustration, desperation, dissatisfaction, boredom and yes, anger. That too. It’s all grist to the mill.
Mistakes also teach us humility. Our mistakes force us to accept that we are not creating alone, but together with the world, with our materials, our moods and our frailties, and they don’t always co-operate with our conscious will. Mistakes and slips reveal that creation is not just the single-minded pursuit of our aims.
The creative process is always and essentially collaborative. Our collaborators are many, varied and fluctuating: words, movement, materials, moods, weather, random accidents of chance, coincidences, and, of course, our audience.
Our mistakes are reminders that we are not the ones in charge here.
Anyway, I went back into the studio on Sunday and made some more mistakes. If I keep piling on the mistakes, maybe, like Pat Steir, I’ll turn out a masterpiece. I live in hope.
In the meantime, I’ll just keep riding this wave until it dissipates.
May you make many mistakes this week.
Sam
Life Raft Co-Working
Come and make mistakes together! Join us for our regular co-working session every Wednesday 3-4pm (UK time), described by one participant last week as ‘like a warm blanket’!
And if you can’t make the time you can work alongside the recorded session from last week. I worked out how to record the gallery view so you get so see everyone busying away. Passcode is 1*5!g%sj. Here’s the link.
Thanks for travelling on with the Life Boat!
I’m so grateful to everyone who is now supporting my work through a paid subscription. I still have a way to go to make The Life Boat self supporting, so if you have been enjoying reading and participating in co-working please consider a paid subscription. So far I have not introduced a paywall, but your support is hugely appreciated.
"Mistakes are new ideas in disguise" - love this! Thanks for this essay
This thought about mistakes made me think of a piece on ideas by Nick Cave.
He said, "Ideas are timid things, in my experience. They come as whispers and you need to hold them in honest regard in order to receive them."
It seems to me that an idea might disguise itself as a mistake. It's a way for it to quietly sneak up on you. If you're prepared to consider the mistake and see it for what it might be, then you're allowing that idea in.
https://www.theredhandfiles.com/creativity-disappears-coax-it-back/