A lesson in ABORTIVE ATTEMPTS

My purchase last month of two new pieces of art spurred me to think about actually hanging art that we’ve had literally lying around the house. Full disclosure: I still haven’t found a place for the Picasso or the piece we’re about to discuss.

As you know, I’m a volunteer at Backstreet Arts, our local free art studio, where I work with those who want to write. Also full disclosure: I haven’t been able to do that in a year because of the pandemic. Soon, we hope.

Kim Ramey, our founder and fearless leader, is a gifted artist herself, and her commitment to her motto, “Art Saves Lives,” is total. Like all artists, and especially this past year, she sometimes will slow to a halt and find it difficult to start back up again.

This was the case last year when I walked in one day and she had created this:

She was feeling blocked, she said, and she just needed to get paint on the page in any way she could. So she whipped out the black and the white and just began slapping paint onto the page without any plan or critique. She just needed to feel her arm making the mark.

The result was just lying around when I got there and, thinking it was a new work, I asked about it. Oh, it’s just a study, she said, a throwaway.

A throwaway — that’s really important to hear and to understand for those of us who think every time we commit to an ABORTIVE ATTEMPT that it has to become a finished work. Hold that thought.

I asked if I might have it; she readily agreed. I asked her to sign it, which she did, and she scribbled a title on it as well: values study.

Here is a new piece, a Thing that now Is, and we need to focus on our fears of both ends of the creative process. First, if we don’t allow ourselves to create crap, to start with an ABORTIVE ATTEMPT, the Thing won’t exist. Get the paint on the canvas, the words on the page, the notes on the staff. Substitute Vecchio Amaro del Capo for Campari in a Negroni.

Okay, so that last one kind of worked, but the point is that we cannot be afraid to start just because we’re afraid it’s going to fail. Remember: Failure is always an option. Just do it.

Last, we cannot be afraid to ABANDON a work. If we have created an ABORTIVE ATTEMPT and played with it until there’s simply no more SUCCESSIVE APPROXIMATION to be done, then we’re through. Not all baby sea turtles make it. Failure is always an option.

Better yet, like Kim, like every “real” artist everywhere, start that ABORTIVE ATTEMPT with no intention or expectation of a finished product. In other words, the ABORTIVE ATTEMPT is the Thing — until you repeat the experiment and find a new way forward, and your “failure” becomes just part of the process of MAKING THE THING THAT IS NOT.

Remember:

Make it. So.