We are taught to think that failure doesn’t mean anything. Actually, failure is a useful part of the creative toolkit. When something fails, when something doesn’t work, you can find it easier to understand why the things you are proud of do work.
The picture above – ink on watercolour postcard, using a wet-on-wet technique – sort of works. The next picture I’m going to show you didn’t work, but when I brought it home and laid it on the table, my Dad made a little noise, and said “that’s interesting”. Now, I hate it, but I can’t only show off the things that work. Sometime you have to show the things that you hate.
Yech.
What’s wrong with this is that it’s too simplistic, too – for want of a better word – too “A-Level Art”.
But what making this awful thing showed me was that I needed to learn more. I needed to look at things and find out how I could display them at their best. Part of that struggle is going to be about technique, how I handle materials, but the main part of that struggle is about learning how I want images to appear on paper. It’s not enough to go somewhere pretty and make my impression of it on paper, it’s about learning how to look at a place, or a thing, and work out what qualities I want to transfer onto paper.
There might be some more failures between here and there, but if I sat down and made work that I was super-proud of first time round, I’d learn nothing. It’s the failures that make things interesting.
I’ve finally cracked the problem of working on busy streets: bring a good pair of headphones.
