Bad Art

Making bad art to make good art

Bad:
Failing to reach an acceptable standard
Unfavorable
Spoiled
Evil
Mischievous
Disobedient

Bad (slang):
Good, Great

I took art class with my grandmother on Saturdays growing up. I loved it for the connection it fostered with my grandmother, but the art part was painstaking. I could never get the perfect line, the precise color of the sky. The harder I tried to emulate my grandmother’s mathematically proportioned faces, landscapes & hands, the more frustrated I became. I could never do it right. I could never sit still long enough. I figured I just wasn’t meant to be an artist.

Years later when I was working as a nanny, I would oversee my 4 year old charge’s painting time. He used black poster paint on old paper grocery bags. One day I joined him & it was like something lit up inside of me. It was complete painting freedom. I wasn’t worried about “wasting” paper or precious paint. I wasn’t worried about impressing my 4 year old companion with an accurate depiction of a turtle. We could do whatever we wanted…no matter how demented it turned out.

I’ve been painting in that way for about 7 years now, but sometimes I get caught in an eddy of sameness. I get too “good” at faces & they lose some spark of soul. Or else perfectionism rears its sleek head: “these are “good”, but why can’t I do them better.” So I have to break from the familiar line & introduce some of the unexpected. I have to be willing to make bad art to make good art & sometimes it’s so bad it’s actually good.

I do this by:

1. Painting random black splotches across the page & then work to connect them into some discernible figure

   

   

2. When I mess up I just black it out & build from there. It forces my imagination into new directions. Hair becomes a bird. A head becomes an umbrella. A faceless woman becomes the mysterious “other”.

   

   

3. I start with an extremity. This never fails in leading to an unexpected looking figure.

   

   4. I let the painting speak to me. Sometimes what would otherwise be a really boring, throwaway painting comes alive with a phrase. I cannot force this. When it happens, the figure in the picture literally says the line to me. The phrase appears like a lit up sign in my mind’s eye.

   

   

   5. I know I’m on the path of breaking through a perfectionistic spell when a painting appears that actually makes me laugh. If a painting makes me feel both embarrassed and surprised, I know I’ve successfully goosed my inner critic out of self-seriousness. For example, this one…

   

These steps are the equivalent of doing The Artist’s Way’s “morning pages”: freehand, freeform, throwaway words that clear the pipe of debris and allow clearer waters to flow through. It lightens me up, loosens my hand & allows for something unexpected to come through.

I did all except two of these paintings a few mornings ago when I was feeling like my hand was “off”. After the hour was up, things had gotten moving again.

Often the pieces I consider mistakes end up being my favorites. And even if my bad art is really just plain bad at least I am having fun while making it.