Bad Paintings

I was chatting with a friend through an exchange of emails the other day and they asked had I ever painted a bad painting, or at least I read it as a question, as in, “Are you willing to paint a bad painting?” When in fact is was actually a statement “You are willing to risk painting badly in order to paint something new” which is really a huge compliment and true enough, I guess, but it isn’t how I think of myself, and so like anything people say about me, I like to try it on and wear it around for a while and see if it fits. I mean, sure, I paint bad paintings, and yes, I like to experiment, which might look like I like to take risks, but while I like trying new things, I hate having to talk about it, because in art people want to know what it is you are doing or what it is you are trying to say, and about the time they think they have it figured out, I go and change it up and say “that is not it at all, that is not what I meant at all.” Colleagues and professors will ask me “Why did you do that?” and “What does that mean?” and I never have an answer, or at least, I don’t have an answer that I am willing to share, because the answer in my head always sounds so naïve. “It looked cool” or “I was just messing around” and then they shake their heads in collective disdain or worse they say nothing at all because there is nothing to say. It’s like saying “I paint pretty butterflies, aren’t they pretty?” and while that will sell t-shirts, it doesn’t build credibility.

I think there is a question in there. Does consistency build credibility? And the corollary to that is what does consistency consist of? Painting is just painting, but you can’t paint paintings of butterflies one day and spirals and squiggles the next and expect people to understand, so the consistency here isn’t in the act of painting, but in what you paint. A good fiction author writes fiction and a good documentary filmmaker makes documentaries and while yes we are all encouraged to explore other venues, to do so with great abandon tends to confuse.

Then there is this whole other song inside my head that I am whistling away while I type and that is who is the audience? Can you write poetry for some and non-fiction for others? Would Whitman still be Whitman if he spent his off hours writing Civil War documentaries? Or is he Whitman because he spent his off hours polishing his craft and refining those things that he wrote while he was working? I suppose you hear tell of Renaissance men and women who can do it all, the proverbial Jack-of-all-trades who knows no boundaries and no fear. Their myths inspire and delight us, but truth be told (a phrase I have been using a lot lately) Leonardo didn’t finish much, and the stuff he did finish is falling apart. Durer might be a better example, or Michelangelo as both of these me wore numerous hats. But can we honestly expect to measure ourselves by these men, when in all reality most normal, humble people don’t aspire to do so much and nonetheless tend to fare pretty well. There is a lesson here somewhere: I am no Michelangelo, and I don’t want to be.

I will tell you what I told my friend “In short, I have made a lot of bad paintings. But it was never really about what is good and what is bad, in the moment of creation I loved each painting dearly and poured myself into them with abandon. It is odd, but what I think I am really doing in art is working on me, and the painting is just the remnant... kind of like sequin wasting- you punch the little holes making sequins and what is left over, the ribbon, you sell as a decorative bow.” Then my audience is really me and not anyone else and it doesn’t really matter what I paint because I don’t aspire to fame or stardom or any of that jazz, what I really aspire to is being happy and making pretty little paintings that people enjoy and sometimes even making one or two that have a little something extra, some meaning or insight attached to them not that I strive for this, but when it happens, when that magic little something goes ka-pow, then I smile a little secret smile to myself that says “I didn’t mean for it to happen, I didn’t plan for it to happen, but it happened and that’s that!”