"Don't Worry, Be Happy"

Don't fear the imperfections

“The goal of art isn't to attain perfection. The goal is to share who we are. And how we see the world."

— Rick Rubin, The Creative Act: A Way of Being

If you’re aiming for perfection you may never paint again. Your purpose is to show your current vision. As Rubin says above, show who you are and how you perceive what you see.

That means courage is more important than confidence and mistakes should be embraced.

Last week I joined a group of painters for some outdoor painting. One of the artists mentioned this was her first time plein air painting and she didn’t like the work she’d done. She couldn’t get the leaves on the trees to look like leaves and she was getting frustrated.

I thought her painting looked great. Exciting composition, variety of shapes and colours, but she was focused on trying to make the leaves look like leaves. And that focus on perfection was leaving her frustrated.

Painting shouldn’t be a chore. It shouldn’t leave you stressed. Instead, it should bring joy. And your focus should be on the interpretation of what you see, however you see it.

In my last post I talked about about having fun with your art, embracing the imperfections. Simply adding layers of texture and colour just to see where it takes you. This time, we’re working on a mixed media gel print, specifically imperfect, but where each layer informs the next until a design appears that speaks positively to you, even in all its messiness.

I started by making a torn irregular shape as a stencil then printing that. It was fine as a start. Since the stencil was somewhat vertical I decided I might add something smaller as a horizontal. Some rough, uneven dark lines across the image did the trick.

Then I felt the background colour needed a little more interest so I decided to vary it a bit using randomly applied colours and some spritzed water. My focus is almost always on nature when I paint so I stepped outside the studio and picked a leaf from the potato vine in our window box.

I decided the large leaf would be the focus of the final print so I added paint to the leaf and tried printing it. Didn’t work all that well so I added rough, imperfect lines around the leaf edges to make it pop from the page. I also added some graphite lines around the background box to roughly define it.

If the leaf was to be the important piece of the print it needed to be a little livelier so I hand coloured the leaves with watercolour pencils and dried the image overnight. It still needed more life so I decided to add some soft pastel which, to me, immediately brought the piece together. The rich and intense colour of the pastels made the image sing. So I stopped.

Instead of judging each layer, I worked with curiosity, with “what if's” - what if I added a line, what if I made the colour more vibrant. And each “what if” becomes a learning experience that helps define future direction. Not every mark has to succeed but the imperfections help develop skill, growth and confidence.

And best of all, these marks, intended or otherwise, help you become an artist.

Thanks for being here.

Cheers

Bob