A Thousand Times – Failure

I sit on the floor, surrounded by boxes and bins filled with paintings. There is a pile of drawings draped over more bins, ready to spill onto the floor.

Paintings and drawings in pastel, charcoal, graphite, pen and ink, watercolor, egg tempera, and oil.

I start to sort them chronologically, by medium, and then subject matter. Mixed feelings of delight well to the surface along with despair…oh! I still have that one…Oh…Wow…that’s terrible.

A flood of memories and feelings swirl for attention. Comments from friends and instructors drift through my mind as well as words that went unsaid, a look on someone’s face.

How do you respond to a piece this terrible, I think.

Vignettes of plein air outings, camping trips, standing in the heat of the dessert, hiking up mountain trails, laughing, oblivion of deep focus, uncertainty, despair, and small victories. Time with friends. Time alone.

These thoughts are interwoven with feelings and memories.

There are 100s, perhaps a 1000 failures on the floor around me.

Twelve years, I think. No, that’s not right. I recalculate. It’s been 14 years, since I took that first painting class. How long had I talked about it before I found that painting class?

A six week painting class in acrylic was my starting point. That was quickly followed by a semester of drawing at Front Range Community College in Fort Collins, CO. Then learning pastel at Schissler Academy in Loveland, CO before taking another drawing class, and then a plein air workshop with Aaron Schuerr. The dominoes of classes, workshops, and countless hours of practice lined up to working with Deborah Paris and her Landscape Atelier program, until I calculated time, money, energy and effort and arrived at the Great Lakes Atelier of Fine Art in Duluth, MN with Jeffery Larson in 2019. The half-way point – so far. Perhaps we could call it the beginning.

I sort more piles, studies that I can use as teaching aids. A small pile that might be worth a revisit.

Another pile should go to the studio to show my students…See what you can do when you stick to it and follow the training?

I think of an earlier conversation that day about revisiting old work. “All the good paintings sell, and we are left with our failures.”

And these? What do I do with these? I think as I look at a stack of canvases, a pile of painting starts. Attempts. Failures. Experiments. Nuggets of understanding.

Back into the bin they go. They are like photographs of my younger self. I am no longer that person, but I want to remember who I was and how I got here.

I take the pile that might be worth revisiting, although I know it will probably just sit on the studio floor. New ideas beckon me now. I am no longer the same person that created those.