I’m at the Frieze London art fair standing ten feet in front of an epic painting by one of my s/heroes, Chantal Joffe. It’s a magnificent piece that takes up an entire wall and must be around three meters wide by two meters high. A grumpy looking woman wearing slippers (I think it’s Chantal) sits on a couch, a man lies next to her with his head on her lap, and there are what looks like a water bottle and a nail polish on a small table next to the woman. It’s a very normal, domestic scene, depicted in Chantal’s customary, luscious ice-cream colours of oil paint. I’m mesmerized by it, yet it’s not perfect.
As I move closer to examine every inch of painting and attempt to slip into the artist’s head to figure out how she produced such a gorgeous work, I notice there’s something off about the face of the woman: the light is bouncing off the work differently here, like it’s not the same substrate. And then I see…Chantal messed up the face. She had to cut a piece of paper, glue it over the face and then try again. Oh, so she is just like the rest of us: she makes mistakes.
Hello! My name is Jacqueline and I’m a recovering perfectionist. Over the years I’ve ruined many a canvas trying to fix a “mistake”, then ended up overworking the piece and creating a mess that couldn’t be salvaged. Perfectionism is a killer for creativity. I’ve tried many ways of tricking myself into loosening up but I’ve also learned that it’s okay to just leave those mistakes on the canvas and not worry about them. From a distance nobody even sees them.
In recent years I’ve found that starting from a place of imperfection works well for me, it sets me off on a path of not seeking perfection from the start. I often begin a work by using “imperfect” materials such as cardboard or recycled envelopes, or I collage cloth onto canvas before I begin painting. These “disrupted surfaces” as I call them, are impossible to paint on accurately: the brush gets pushed around the wrinkles and bumps, paint puddles in the hollows, drawn lines are distorted. Beginning imperfectly allows me to relax and not be so precious about “ruining” a canvas.
As artists, we are always our cruelest critics. Add perfectionism to that and it’s a deadly cocktail of self-doubt, judgment and disapproval - enough to end an art career. I now accept that my work will inevitably be imperfect, yet it will be beautiful/interesting/provocative/humorous nonetheless. That second part is vital: I used to only see the imperfection and nothing else. I became numb to the vitality of my art because all I could focus on was that one huge flaw, and yet seeing that collaged face in Chantal’s work in no way made me think her work was anything less than extraordinary. In fact, I think it’s often the imperfections that lift an artwork from average to amazing, and with so much AI generated art around I’m searching for evidence of the artist’s hand — the smudges and fingerprints, the mistakes and corrections — as evidence of a human artist. Maybe in the future it will only be the imperfections that allow us to know whether something was “hand” made, and perhaps that will make human-created art more valuable? Who knows?
In the book improv wisdom (a gem of a book, by the way), the author, Patricia Ryan Madson says:
A mistake is most often a result that we had not planned — something unexpected, an odd outcome or side journey, usually something new.
Seeing imperfections as odd outcomes or side journeys instead of defects or flaws is a useful way of working through perfectionism. What’s that book about fear? Feel the fear and Do It Anyway? (Written by Susan Jeffers) There needs to be a companion book, See the Imperfection and Show It Anyway, written for artists. If you struggle with perfectionism, try taking a leaf out of Chantal Joffe’s book: embrace the mistake, slap a big piece of paper over it and just say, “yes, it’s an odd outcome but I love it!”
Until next time.
JC
RESOURCES
improv wisdom, Patricia Ryan Madson, find it HERE
The Artisan Soul, Erwin Raphael McManus, find it HERE (there are some interesting bits in this book about letting go and accepting imperfection)
I like this TEDX talk: