To my dearest readers,
I have been thinking about the edit.
When I was 9 or 10, I used to play Snake on my dad’s Nokia while waiting for our food at restaurants. There are no second chances or extra lives in Snake. You bite your tail and that's it, you're done. You run into one of the walls and game over.
The game trained me. Because I got older and played a video game on Disney.com where you had to help Timon and Pumbaa catch bugs to eat. It was space invaders, just Disney-fied. If I didn’t start out playing the game perfectly, like if I missed too many bugs or lost a life too soon, I would jump ship and end the game early.
I think about this all. The. Time. Even though I don’t play video games.
I treat paintings like I treated that Disney.com game.
This week, a painting wasn’t going well. I kept fidgeting with it, trying to build out details, changing colors, and obsessing over the same six square inches of the canvas. I added and removed elements of the image, hoping it would make sense. Finally, after hours of back and forth, after getting so frustrated that I convinced myself I couldn’t paint and this was all a fluke that I was sitting here painting, I trashed the whole thing.
Within the first day of starting a painting, I know if it will go well or if I will fight with it for weeks. And lately, I have been trying to decide if the fight is worth it. Can a painting be fixed? Do I learn things from trying to fix the paintings? Or should I just begin fresh when they don’t look perfect from the start?
I know I have the same problem with writing. Like, when I write something good. Like really and truly good, it starts good and stays good the whole time. It’s like the essay exists in its completed form before I even start typing it out. It’s my job just to yank it down from the ether.
I can make a bad essay okay, but not good. When people read these essays, the ones that were born bad, they say to me “There is nothing wrong with it” but I can always tell by the look on their faces that it wasn’t good. It was just fine. Just barely not bad.
This always reminds me of these myths about artists and writers– like Margaret Atwood writing all of The Handmaid's Tale in a 2-week writing marathon or Hemingway finishing The Old Man and the Sea in a single, drunken night.
And, I believe these myths. I also believe that Hemingway spent a hundred other drunken nights writing absolute garbage. And Margaret Atwood spent half of her life writing and revising and writing some more so that she could get to the point where she could birth The Handmaid’s Tale in its near-completed form in under a fortnight.
I don’t think anyone is just born being able to make good art. I don’t believe in prodigies. Instead, I think quantity is involved in the equation. You have to put yourself in a place where you can make or write something amazing, and some people just start doing that from an earlier age than others.
For example, I think I need to make a certain number of paintings to make a good one. And write a certain number of essays so that people read one and say to themselves, “That was good.” And I hope (pray) that over time, I don’t have to create so much bad work to get to the good stuff.
The number of paintings that I should be creating has come up often lately. Everyone seems to have different ideas– paint more! Paint less! Think more! Think less! My studio mate, Elliot, gave me some of the more salient advice– take some time away from painting every day to make something that has no value. Make something every day just to make it. Make it for no one else. It can be a sketch, a doodle, or a silly little sculpture.
I have been listening and making many ugly drawings that no one will ever see. Just for fun. Drawings that I don’t feel pressure to edit to make perfect. I hope this will get some of the bad work out of my system faster.
I also don’t think I will completely give up on the edit. Sometimes, the edit teaches me more about why the painting was bad and should have been trashed a long time ago than the good paintings teach me how I can make another.
As always, thanks for reading!
What’s for Dinner?
Squash!! Just with butter and salt. Also, Kielbasa for an appetizer. Depending on how you sell it, this could be a very healthy meal.
I always love reading what Mom says.
From this essay, you seem to come to terms with your truth and I’m happy for you.
Remember, your truth does change over time!
Well done dear Claire