Sacrifice for the greater good

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I’ve taught a lot of painting workshops over the years: plein air, painting boats and water, how to make sense of dense forests, and more than a few classes on abstraction from nature.

And I’ve seen a lot of failed romances crop up. Not between students, but between students and their paintings.

I get it, it’s the excitement of something new, the anticipation that maybe this will be the one. Sometimes the object of affection is a specific feature, a part of the painting that is absolutely adorable, something to pin their hopes on.

Or it was just a bad arrangement from the start that they can’t let go of, because they’ve invested an entire 75 minutes of their lives on it.

But, like love, the act of creating involves a lot of sacrifice.

As a learning tool, it’s not a bad idea to hold on to a failed study, if a part of it is a success. It’s a reminder of how to handle that one thing for future reference. But, as a rule, I’d lean toward the harder choice. Just wipe it down. Dancing around the good parts while the rest of the piece is lacking isn’t conducive to an intuitive process. Take a picture and savor the memory that way.

A famous artist once said, be ruthless in your process. You have to be prepared to sacrifice your darlings (paraphrasing Steve Jobs), or lose the things that aren’t working for a more cohesive whole.  

Any creative act is a multi-tiered event, like a good book, song, or painting. Each layer is there to support the final outcome. Faulty layers rarely support a successful outcome.

You eventually become okay with destroying a work in progress, favorite bits and all, for the sake of a potentially greater outcome. It’s very freeing when you do. I consider each layer as what it is; nothing is sacred. This way of thinking can be applied to a part of the whole, the whole thing, or an entire series. There’s also an element of surprise in the act of destruction, occasionally, a new path will show itself. New Ideas are funny like that.

Ultimately the fear is in sacrificing some good thing for an unknown outcome, which is hard to do in art and in life. But, it’s just paint and a little bit of time invested. 

Or think of it as a high school relationship. It was fun while it lasted.