I’m teaching an in-person class at Petaluma Arts Center on Sunday, September 7—“From Mess to Masterpiece.” It’s a catchy name for a simple concept: any failed artwork can be saved and transformed.
Every artist has experienced the frustration of a piece going awry. I’ve overworked and messed up my share of paintings! As long as I’m willing to let go of what I want it to look like, I can let it become something new. Click here to read more about the workshop.
I first learned how to take risks during a fiber arts class in college. It wasn’t my favorite medium. I hadn’t yet discovered oils, but I knew I preferred drawing and painting.
And yet I learned something in that class that changed my work forever.
It happened during our first assignment. We dyed silk panels using a few basic techniques. We hung our pieces on the wall and politely critiqued them.
Then the professor told us there was another part of the exercise: we had to destroy our work and make it into something else.
We all stared at her. Destroy our beautiful art? She showed us a table full of scissors, glue, string and wire, sculpting supplies, wax, wood, everything you could imagine. She said we could use anything in that table to create something new. But we had to start with cutting our silk into pieces.
This was long before smart phones, so we had no way of documenting our art. Once we accepted what we had to do, the fun began.
One student sliced his red and orange fabric into flame shapes, soaked them in wax, then hung it from a wire and set it on fire. I cut my blue-green art into fish shapes and hid them throughout a garden. Others did interesting things too, although I can’t remember them. The point is, I learned how to let go of an artwork’s pretty beginning, and risk destroying it to make it better.
