Don’t Be Afraid To Destroy Your Work
Hi all!
In my experiences of painting I’ve done a lot of things. I’ve done realistic work. I’ve done abstract work. I’ve done multi-media work etc. etc.
Some of it has been really good. Images of the ones that I care about are viewable on this blog. Those that I don’t care about, paintings, drawings and multi-media artworks alike you’ll never see because quite frankly, I destroy them.
That’s right, I destroy them. Gone forever. Ripped up, torn up, painted over. Gone.
You may be wondering, “How can I do this?” Well, it’s easy. It comes down to one simple rule: Don’t show anything that you don’t want to be known for. To learn more about this idea please have a look at the companion article to this one, “Put Your Best Artwork Forward”.
The road to being a successful artist is a long and bumpy one. You’ll find things that work for you and things that don’t; mediums that fit and those that don’t; ideologies that make sense and those that don’t. They come in equal measure. What really shows the strength of an ‘Artist’ is knowing and showing what feels correct.
Let me give you a little history lesson:
Morris Louis. Okay, you may not know who this man is and that’s okay. From my personal point of view he is mostly forgettable except for one thing: He knew when to destroy his work.
The only reason that Morris Louis is still remembered, as far as I’m concerned, is because of his ability for self-censorship. He had the inate ability to destroy his own work when it was inconsequential or detrimental to his career and this helped him in the long run.
He was part of the Abstract Expressionist movement based in 50’s / 60’s America. His whole claim to fame was that he was interested in exploring the ‘flatness’ of the picture plane and worked in a series of pigments to create his ‘veils’ of rainbow-esque colours on unprimed canvas. I’d provide you with a link to some of his work but unfortunately, if you’re interested in seeing what he did you’ll have to look it up yourself. I’ve already promoted Mr. Louis’s work too much. Anyway…
To give him some context he was one of Jackson Pollock’s contemporaries, active at the same time that is but I don’t think they were friends. He created some of the most boring artworks ever (my opinion, but there it is).
Outside of Morris Louis’s lack of ability, his real power lay in self-censoring what he created.
Between the years of 1955 and 1957, he was busy creating artworks on his own without any outside influence. He had sequestered himself away from the world to get on with his work. When he emerged from his cocoon he realized that the work he had been doing was, for lack of a better word, CRAP, so he destroyed it all. According to lore, he slashed well over 300 paintings, finding them to be derivative of current art trends that he couldn’t stand (he should have slashed everything as far as I’m concerned and saved us all the trouble of knowing his name). Can you imagine doing that? Destroying your own work? Hundreds of canvases?
This leads me to the point of this article. Sometimes we should censor our own work. I know that sounds a little ominous but sometime’s it’s necessary.
There may be times that what we do really isn’t worthy of praise or even notoriety, that the dissemination of the offending artwork(s) might do us more harm than good. I’ve been there and chances are, if you do enough artwork your experiences will lead you to the same dead-end. I’ve seen many exhibitions in the past that are crammed floor to ceiling with Art and not all of it was worth looking at. Marcel Dzama is a great example of this.
I checked out a show of his drawings at the Olga Korper gallery several years ago. At the time he was all the rage, making ripples in New York and Canada, so I thought I’d check him out. His drawings were in a single line all the way around the gallery. They were simply hung, a few inches apart under glass which was hob-nailed directly to the wall. Some of it was good. Clear drawings with interesting imagery and a story to tell. Some of it was not.
He had done most of his work on paper, thin paper with ink and watercolours. What does thin paper do when it gets wet? It buckles like mad. Half of his work looked like ripple chips. Then an attempt to flatten them against the wall had been made with glass coverings. It looked awful and from what I can remember he wanted $1000 for each piece.
In my opinion his subpar works, the ones he should have censored and thrown out were hurting his stronger drawings thereby destroying the whole effect of the show. The bad apples will always spoil the barrel.
Had he censored himself a little more rather than just throwing up every little thing that came to his mind then his show would have been more unified, solidified his reputation, made his career stronger and probably have fetched him a better payday. Most of his works were unsold at the time — and rightly so. That was in 2004 and he hasn’t done much since.
Knowing when to censor ourselves is a skill that all Arists need to learn and it comes through time and experience. By doing, we learn about what we like and what we want to say. The more we do the more we hone our visions until we know what we really desire. Someday we’ll reach a point when most of what we produce will be strong work. Until that time we’ve got a lot of wreckage to create.
Chances are, through your evolution as an Artist you’ll make a lot of mistakes and give birth to a lot of malformed ideas, hell knows I have. Looking at my work now, can you imagine that I ever did abstract paintings? Been there, done that — but you’ll never see it.
Good Artists are free and create without inhibitions. Great Artists create and know when to show Artworks of consequence and when to destroy those that should never see the light of day.
I learned this lesson way back in University. I was working on a painting in 4th year class that was on four masonite panels, each 6 feet tall by 4 feet wide. That’s a painting that is 6 feet tall by 16 feet long overall. The theme focused on the plight of the working man.
I worked on it for weeks in an abstract and expressionistic manner. I really thought I had something positive on my hands but in the end, I hated it. It was terrible and not really what I was trying to say so…I destoyed it. This was a wall sized painting with hundred’s of dollars worth of materials invested in it and I killed it because quite frankly it was something that I never wanted to be known for.
I will never show the world any Art that I don’t feel strongly for or that I don’t think represents me as an Artist. Even though I am an Artist, everything that I do is not necesarily Art.
If you want to shoot your career in the foot then get known for something that you don’t care for. You’ll get type cast like so many movie actors do and soon you’ll find that you’ll only get cast for parts that you don’t care to portray.
Don’t be afraid to destroy your own work — if it’s crap. You’ll be doing yourself a favour in the long run. The ability of self-censorship won’t come overnight and chances are the first time that you do it you’ll feel let down or have some slight pangs of loss. Don’t worry, this is normal. It’ll pass and you’ll find your next shredding session will be easier.
Artwork that you don’t wish to be known for is better off in the trashbin. It may seem harsh now and may take some time to get used to but ten years from now when you’re doing what you really want to do, you’ll thank yourself for your courage and bravado for making the right choices.
Francis Bacon had no difficulties with this concept and look at where he ended up, famous, rich and coveted by some of the worlds finest art galleries. A story I read in his unofficial biography had him purchase one of his own paintings from a gallery as he strolled past one day. It was a simple painting, just a sketch really for a larger piece that Francis had cast off and left for dead. Someone had found it and put it up for sale with a £50,000 price tag. Francis having spied it quickly walked into the gallery, paid the price for the painting, quickly walked out again and stomped the painting to death right there on the sidewalk. Self-censorship at its finest. I love that story.
For now, that is all. Goodnight.
