Painter’s Remorse

John Lacey — Sat, 13 Feb 2010 10:53:29 +0000

Kate Bush sings in ‘An Architect’s Dream‘:

Watching the painter painting
And all the time the light is changing
He keeps painting
That bit there
It was an accident
He’s so pleased
It’s the best mistake he could make
Now it’s my favourite piece
It’s just great.

I wrote about getting started. I wanted to write too about knowing when to stop. No, I don’t mean giving up. I mean acknowledging the point at which an individual piece of work (or art) is finished. The truth is you can keep working on something forever, especially if you’re waiting for it to be ‘perfect.’

The Artist’s Way – that book that I am forever referencing on this website – has interesting quotes from interesting people in the columns around the main text of the tome. I particularly like this one from Paul Gardner:

A painting is never finished – it simply stops in interesting places.

I guess the next question is, simply, which interesting place do you stop at?

I wish I had some definitive answer for you. If my couple of months of painting have taught me anything it has been that sometimes I’ll have a profound sense that a canvas is finished. But other times I will have an impulse to experiment, to try something just to see what will happen. And this is great! It is wonderful to take creative risks, to feel like you can do this. But experimenting with a canvas is very different to experimenting with words in a word processor. You can completely alter a paragraph in a manuscript on your computer and if it looks wrong you can change it back. Sometimes you’ll have the luxury of an ‘undo’ feature, other times you’ll just recreate something from memory. It is harder with a canvas. There are very real limits to what you can do to ‘remove’ paint from a canvas.

[And as though to illustrate my point I just wrote a paragraph in this blog and then deleted it to start again. See? It is easier in text.]

So when I’ve painted an eerie graveyard scene and am happy with the canvas I could stop in this interesting place. Only… I can’t seem to do that. No, I’m fascinated by the idea of coloured washes. It doesn’t seem to matter that I’ve never found a personally satisfying application for them in any of the other paintings I’ve done. I’m hung up on them. I think it will give the painting a sense of depth and add to the overall mood. But it doesn’t work out as I imagine. The entire scene is obscured in the process. I have this moment where I think to myself, “You know John, you had a perfectly workable piece of artwork before you did that.”

But I don’t want to beat myself up. Risk is kind of what it’s all about. Creative risk is the reason our parents secretly (sometimes not-so-secretly) wish we’d give up our creative pursuits and work in banks. And I have to realise if I hadn’t been prepared to take some risks I wouldn’t be painting at all. I wouldn’t be writing, I wouldn’t be blogging. I wouldn’t be podcasting. I wouldn’t make videos and put them on the Internet. I wouldn’t be doing any of the things that are important to me if I hadn’t been prepared to experience creative risk.

The other thing worth remembering is that the stretched canvases and canvas boards I use are quite affordable. Infact compared to my university education… you know, I don’t think I’ll finish that thought.

Happy risk taking!

Creativity Is Still A Process

John Lacey — Sat, 10 Oct 2009 10:04:17 +0000

I’ve been a fan of Kate Bush for some time now. For some reason over the last three days I’ve been particularly fascinated by her work, watching documentaries and music videos and interviews with her. The thing that I found interesting was the way music commentators described her as being a ‘fully-formed’ artist from her musical debut. The inference I think was that she came out of the womb as the creative force we see and know and love today. This was despite the fact that the same documentary alluded to her artistic development; to her learning the piano and the violin from an early age, her studying dance, her writing songs from a very young age, her EMI ‘Artist Development’ deal, and a wealth of support from her parents (her father was typically the first audience for her early works) and family friends. To me this demonstrated a complete lack of understanding of the creative process as a process.

In the same documentary the same commentators suggested her Hounds Of Love album was her greatest and most complete work. They went further to suggest that the reason for this was because after being hurried on earlier projects, being constrained by time and the expense of studios and equipment, she built her own home studio. Here she could work at her own pace, here she could entertain creative whims and take artistic risks. The difference here was time. Because ideas – and artists – go through a period of gestation, and creativity and art take time.

In a similar vein, Mur Lafferty in her most recent podcast ISBW #133 – You’re allowed to suck / Anders and Defendini Interview:

You’re allowed to suck in your first draft but you’re also allowed to suck at the beginning of your career. Now I haven’t read the book yet but I have heard many people mention the Malcolm Gladwell book that talks about how you need to have 10,000 hours of doing something before you’re a master. And a lot of people have said ‘You don’t want to sell your first novel.’ And some outspoken agents on Twitter have even said ‘Don’t send me your NaNoWriMo novel.’ NaNoWriMo probably says, ‘we are all about quantity over quality. The goal is to get the book on the page, after that fix it. Or make it longer. Or learn how to write a book.’

I think one problem novice writers have is we believe every idea we have is a perfect snowflake that must go out to the world. This is what causes people to work on a book for 20 years. It’s what causes people to freak out when they’re rejected, and not think, ‘okay, well if this story or book has been rejected 50 times maybe I should put it aside and write something else.’

John Lacey » Kate Bush

Painter’s Remorse

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