The Importance Of Failure In The Creative Process

Yesterday’s painting was a failure I think.

Raven Batique

Maybe I’ll see it differently in a few days. Or months. Sometimes I set aside a painting thinking it’s a failure because it wasn’t what I had in mind, was striving for, so I set it aside. Then I come across it in the reject pile months later, and like it. In fact, that is true of some of paintings that later turn out to be favorites. Technically, many of these are failures but they capture something unique and interesting about the subject.

More often though, a painting that feels like a failure when it is completed still feels like a failure months later. I discard most paintings I start, and many that I complete.

Paintings most often fail because I lacked a simple, clear vision at the outset. Or, I had a clear idea at the outset but lost touch with the idea during the execution.

Lucid Journey, now one of my favorites, spent some time in the recycling bin.

On the other hand, that’s probably true of my successful paintings too. When I painted Two Egrets, my most successful painting, at least in terms of sales, the plan was to paint a mangrove forest. There was no intention of adding egrets. They were an afterthought, and the forest, in the process of painting, became a waterfall.

Two Egrets

Butterfly Blue started off as a bird in a tree.

Butterfly Blue

The paintings that excite me, that make the hair on the back of my neck tingle are the simple, quickly executed sketches that capture something profound about the essence of a subject. Like the painting on the cover of Wild Waters And The Tao.

Wild Waters And The Tao

The best way to execute those is to work on three paintings at a time, execute them quickly, and move on. Then, the next day, come back and consider whether or not they were successful. I told myself that yesterday several times as I labored on Raven Batique.

But didn’t do it.

Ninety-five percent of the results of creativity are garbage. Derek Sivers has been very inspirational to me in the sense of asking himself, “How good was my failure today? What did I try that didn’t work?”  That for me is a real inspiration. To every day try and do something that I could have failed at. That is part of the process. That acceptance of small failures.
-        Kevin Kelly on CreativeLive. Kelly is the founding executive editor of Wired magazine, and a former editor/publisher of the Whole Earth Review. He has also been a writer, photographer, conservationist, and student of Asian and digital culture.