Creative Director: Data

I Create: Creative Director of My Life.

Do you know what’s helpful along your path to achieve any goal? Data. Information.

It’s recently come to my awareness, about an artist that is sharing her book: ‘We Need Your Art,’ Amie McNee. I haven’t read it or seen it in person, but she advocates for creating. Using your creativity. Sharing it even, but at least creating for you. And she makes the specific point to make terrible art.

This seems to align with me right now. To make lots of crappy art. It feels awful and cringey at the time but it provides something valuable: Data. This data is my information of what doesn’t work, skills to go from something not working and being awful, and working through that and tweaking aspects along the way until it’s not crappy art.

The data is my confirmation of what I don’t like. Data of what medium works best, for the look that I want, and information of how to develop my own style, find my own way.

I’ve resisted making ‘crappy art’ because after I do, I have this thought that I just wasted time. I have nothing worthwhile to look at or show for the time I spent, so that’s the trickiest part of committing to making crappy art. Even though the time isn’t wasted: it’s giving me data. I think that’s why people don’t want to ‘fail’ at something. You feel like you just lost time and have to then make up for it. You feel like you’ll be behind.

I saw a quote recently that working to be the best at something, means you’re actually committing to being bad at something for a prolonged period of time. But not giving up or letting that stop you. Being terrible for so long, that you start to be good, and develop skill. You can’t let the cringey-awfulness in the middle stop you from getting to the other side.

So I’ve decided I need to specifically commit to making crappy, terrible art. I have a sketchbook that I stated with some pastels to play around and it’s fitting as the work looks awful. So I’ll fill this book. The intention will be to make it messy, loose, and just experiment. This isn’t easy for me as I like when I can do something well – or half decent – and ‘control’ what the outcome is. Making terrible and loose, messy art on purpose goes against my instinct, but I recognize that I need this. I need to have ‘messy’ work that will never be presentable.

I think it also releases some pressure, or helps steer my focus. I’ve been asked to make a painting for a book cover. I’m excited about it and inspired by the project but I’ll want to use acrylic for the darkness of the piece. I use acrylic less often and so now I doubt myself and worry that I won’t be able to make this look as amazing as I can envision it. I decided I’ll want to make sample pieces, perhaps incorporating the lighter watercolour in the background, but make many works of varying colour tone and boldness and choosing which works best. This all means that I have to be in a mindset and expectation that any test piece could be the inspiration for the final work. I won’t set expectation on any one test until I know how I want to go forward. It’s the mindset of play, test, sample and knowing that some are going to end up looking terrible. But this all gives me data and confirmation when I move on to the end result. And being closer to another goal realized.

Until next week,

Devon