Failure is essential to the development of both your art and your artistic character.
Every artist wants to find their voice and that unique style they can be known for. The problem arises when you get stuck in your head trying to visualise what that style will look like. The truth is, if you want to make something truly meaningful that resonates with your soul, you have to be willing to fail to get there. Developing your art style doesn’t come purely from visualisation, but from actually doing the work. When you are willing to try new things. To take risks and make something that might not work, that’s when you begin to uncover new possibilities for your work. When you fumble and fall through the process of creation, you’re free to discover new styles and techniques. But if you stay in your safe zone, you’ll never know what magical things you might have created if you were just willing to try something risky and see the results.
In this letter, I’m going to share with you 3 principles that will help you to uncover your unique style and contribution to the world.
Principle 1: Play
Play is the ultimate gateway to discovery. When you play, there is a lightness that enters your attitude and work. You give yourself the freedom to try things, which leads to artistic discovery and even self-discovery if you allow it. In this way, you’re letting the work find you through improvisation. One act leads to the next. By being consumed in the process of playing, you’re less focused on the final result, allowing yourself to enjoy making art, instead of stopping yourself mid-process because the work isn’t meeting your expectations.
Feeling joy usually aids in better work, as when you’re overly serious, the work becomes heavy and suffers for it. We have all probably faced that inner critic, the voice in our heads that tells us this work isn’t good enough, or this isn’t worth pursuing. But when you enter a playful state, you’re able to quiet this part of the mind and engage fully with the work.
Perhaps you can remember a time when you were a small child playing with mini action figures, dolls or toy cars? You probably weren’t thinking this is silly or worthless. You were fully engaged in the activity, and your imagination was free to explore all the possibilities of the worlds you were building with these toys. We can use our artistic tools in the same way.
This childlike state of mind is what we need to access to enable discovery and development in our art. The moment you became self-conscious of the “you” playing with those toys was probably the moment you stopped playing altogether. It just wasn’t fun anymore.
This self-consciousness can stop us from wanting to create risky art. But when you enter a state of play, you can’t fail. Every artwork is an exploration and a chance to discover not only what you like, but also what you don’t, and this is essential for an artist’s development.
A playful state lets you experiment in an unfiltered way, which helps you to find new forms and styles you could have never conceived by simply sitting and using your imagination alone.
This brings me to:
Principle 2: Experiment
You can experiment seriously or you can experiment playfully. The latter often revolves around asking yourself a simple question: What happens if I do this? And I’ll be honest. When you try something new out for the first time, you can ruin a piece of work, but sometimes you can also strike gold and stumble onto new techniques, skills or forms that were previously unimaginable.
There is a classic question in art: How do you know when a painting is finished? And of course, there’s no clear answer to this; it’s a feeling. You can go on tweaking parts of a painting forever.
Therefore, part of making good art is simply knowing when to stop. But how do you know when something is finished if you’ve never pushed your art to the extremes and risked ruining a work to see if you could make it better? Curiosity is not your enemy, it’s your ally.
For me, most of the excitement of creating comes from not knowing what the final result will look like. Once I begin to see the final form appearing in an artwork, I tend to lose interest. It has satisfied my curiosity, and I no longer have the desire to see it through.
Leonardo Davinchi was often cited as not finishing his work for this very reason. He was an experimenter. His mind moved faster than he could create, and therefore, he didn’t really have a career of neatly curated masterpieces, but rather left a paper trail of experiments instead.
He had many failed attempts, including a disastrous commission in which he deviated from traditional fresco and applied oil paints to a wax-coated wall. The result was a hideous painting that dripped down the wall and didn’t even dry. But it’s through these experiments that we’ve come to know him as one of the most genius creators of all time.
If he hadn’t experimented and instead played it safe, staying within the confines of what he already knew worked, he would’ve never created all the masterpieces and inventions that were ahead of his time, and he is known for today.
That’s not to say you shouldn’t finish work. Obviously, you need to create a body of finished pieces to be a successful artist or creator. But if you want to stand out, if you want to create something groundbreaking, you have to be able to risk failing, to push the work to extremes and discover the full potential of where you and your work can go. It might not work, but that can be exciting.
This is a process of iteration. You learn by doing and building on what you have already done. As you go through this process, you will start to develop your taste. You will learn what works and what doesn’t. What you like and what you dislike. What parts of the process do you enjoy, and what parts you don’t.
Through both play and experimentation, you can develop your unique style and taste. This is really how you start to make work that has your own voice. But it also requires one more principle to truly discover your art style. And that is…
Principle 3: Awareness
Awareness is all about tuning in to that voice without volume. The part of you that instinctively feels and knows what’s right. Yes, this includes intuition, which helps you to play and experiment. But intuition is a huge topic for another video. Using your awareness is more about taking a step back. Observing both yourself and the artwork being made in real time.
Notice how you feel, what you think. What lights you up as you’re working? What signs and signals do you get from your body that tell you, Wow. I’m really onto something here.
This is what I’m really talking about here when I use the term “Mindful Creator” throughout all of my videos. We’re not only making things that are thoughtful and considerate of the culture and ecology of the world around us. But also, we are bringing our awareness to the present moment of creation. In this way, our art can become both a therapeutic practice for ourselves and others by revealing something deep about the human experience.
To aid this discovery, I recommend using writing to journal about the observations you had while making the piece. Write on the back of the work itself or the adjacent page if using a sketchbook. Write about the thoughts, feelings and insights you had while making the piece. What you find attractive and what you find repulsive.
This writing aids in your artistic development because it guides you towards making more and more authentic work. And as a bonus, it can also be used as copy for marketing, sales or your website at a later date. If you ever return to the piece and notice something different, you can always add more notes to the work.
Often, the work that we consider bad, flawed or failed tends to teach us the most about ourselves and the universe than the successful works. These artworks reveal truths that become the cornerstone for our development as artists. As David Bayles and Ted Orland say in their book called Art & Fear, “The function of the overwhelming majority of your artwork is simply to teach you how to make the small fraction of your artwork that soars. One of the basic and difficult lessons every artist must learn is that even the failed pieces are essential.”
Over the years, I have stumbled across many different techniques and ways to express myself. And what has resulted has been an incredible journey of self-discovery. But that self-discovery wouldn’t have happened if I hadn’t brought awareness and practised mindfulness while creating. I know first-hand that Art can be a spiritual practice, and when approached in this way, it can be used both as therapy and to improve yourself.
As I’ve developed my work over the years, I’ve continued to experiment with form, medium and subject matter. My interest in using art to explore my inner world and understand reality through the creative process has always remained.
It’s through this curiosity that I’ve been able to discover these principles and pragmatically apply them to develop my taste and style. Most of my work has been recycled, tossed or burned, but do I regret making them? Not at all. It’s what has allowed me to create the works I am proud of and discover things about myself and reality that I never would’ve dreamed were possible.
Ultimately, this process of play, experimentation and iteration will help you to develop your taste and find your voice, much, much faster than sitting around and fantasising about making the perfect artwork. So don’t be afraid to fail and explore.
Have fun with it, that’s the point after all.
If you enjoyed this letter and want to learn more about being a mindful creator, join our community here: guildofmindfulcreators.com