Michael Cunningham, author of The Hours, (which was, incidentally, to me, one of the few books that was better as a movie than as a read) said in an interview on the radio (CBC of course), that honorable failures are important to creativity. He is not afraid of taking risks, making mistakes, and making them big.
I do understand this. One of the most important turning points in my life was when I had some work in a three-person show at St. Mary’s University here in Halifax. The other two artists were Wayne Boucher and Richard Mueller. The year was 1989, I think, and I had a part-time administrative job at the Buddhist center that took up a large part of my time. The other part of my time, what was left over, I painted. My artwork was fairly successful then, especially the work on paper. I had developed a system, a method, a procedure: organizing the chaotic first impulses, the first creative marks, by honing them down into triangular boundaries. It worked, I thought. But when I saw my paintings in the exhibit, next to Wayne's exhuberant large black and white canvases and Richard's experiments with materials and ideas, I saw my work as an “honorable failure,” one that looked awful, tight, limiting. Yet this public exposure forced me to realize that I was organizing my work into a corner and I had to break out of it.
After the exhibit, feeling totally irritated at my “system,” the triangles self-destructed and a whole new world, a more organic process opened up for me. And it keeps opening every time I dare myself to take a chance on something that challenges my preconceptions, preconceived ways of working. There is, it seems, no safe corner in this world.
Posted by leya at July 11, 2005 08:50 AM