“I’m not good at X”; on using failure as a tool
My journey into color began shortly after I started drawing in 2018, just a few months after I picked up a ballpoint pen from the kitchen, sat in my backyard, and didn’t leave for five hours. Oh, I thought, looking down at my sketchbook, This!
But black and white could only get me so far. I wanted to honor every detail but kept losing complexity by overworking my drawings with black ink. And I wanted to draw the sky. Not with dots or cross-hatching which took me further away from it, but the pure sky.
Before even attempting it, I could see oil and acrylic paint splattered all over the walls and carpet of my bedroom, my rental deposit shrinking with every mark. I gave up on pastels almost immediately, and that was enough indecision for me. I went with watercolors because they seemed the most tame, and perhaps I was lulled by memories of painting with a fat brush and scratched-up Crayola watercolor set as a kid.
After watching several YouTube tutorials, I attempted a few scenes: a deserted parking lot with blue skies overhead, my childhood library flanked by trees, the view of Brady Street from an outdoor café seat. But in the pits of learning a new skill, I couldn’t accept how long it would take to improve, and therefore the fact that I could improve. I would do that all the time back then: avoid something by accepting the one thing that would prevent me from getting to it. In ways I don’t understand, I still do it.
Controlling watercolors was tricky. I kept adding too much or too little water which resulted in soggy pages and rough looking patches where I wanted to see a smooth surface. The buildings I drew required small details and hard edges. I needed to know which type of brush to use, how fast to move the brush, nimble fingers, etc., knowledge that is not really knowledge but learned intuition gathered over time. What I ended up with was a blobby, patchwork interpretation of a house, overlapping a sky that was delineated by several attempts to cover the page as paint dried faster than I moved.
Exasperated, I took my pen and began outlining the shapes’ edges that I had painted, even the ones that veered off-course. Every schmear and patch, I picked apart with pen, marking up each variation in density and every “mistake” so that they were enhanced. This made the lack of color consistency more apparent, another “mistake” that took my drawing a step further from realism. Maybe I did this in my own sarcastic, self-deprecating way—you made a mistake, why don’t you just call attention to it?—but the process stuck, and I enjoyed it. I ended up with drawings that were blobby and imperfect, and I enjoyed those too.
So this is the mysterious “process.” It’s always strange to experience something that you thought happens to other people, like locking your keys in the car while it’s running. In this way, I developed a style unique to myself, from the nostalgia of Crayola watercolors to my lack of patience for learning new things as an adult.
But despite my mental loopholes, at the end of the day, something exists outside of me that says nothing about my lack of know-how. It doesn’t whisper “you failed” or explain everywhere I went wrong. It just exists. Sometimes I hear advice about art or writing or life that emphasizes trust. Like, “trust yourself, and good things will come.” I always thought they meant that if I try hard enough, I will succeed. Maybe they did. But I believe in trusting my failures and insecurities, too, that they can help me create something worthwhile and specific.
In Hannah' Gadsby’s comedy special Nanette, she says multiple times, “you learn from the part of the story you focus on.” While I don’t want my insecurities to be the only narrative I listen to, I believe there’s room to let them speak and walk around on the page a bit. I’m trying, and failing, to live in cahoots with my mistakes. I’m trying to learn from my mistakes by making the same ones over and over again in hopes that, through repetition, I will find—what? Insight, answers, or vague, unknown remedies? Maybe I’m waiting for a version of myself that doesn’t exist outside of art to surface, for that person to greet me and say, hey, it’s okay that you didn’t know you were always enough.