Being Good isn't the Point

Rethinking Artistic Merit and Embracing Creative Freedom

“Sunk for a long time in profound thoughts as to the value of obscurity, and the delight of having no name, but being like a wave which returns to the deep body of the sea; thinking how obscurity rids the mind of irk of envy and spite; how it sets running in the veins the free waters of generosity and magnanimity; and allows the giving and taking without thanks offered or praise given; which must have been the way of all great poets, he supposed..., for he thought, Shakespeare must have written like that, and the church builders built like that, anonymously, needing no thanking or naming, but only their work in the daytime and a little ale perhaps at night--what an admirable life this is.”

-Virginia Woolf, “Orlando”

Being good at art isn’t really all that important. Being known for it isn’t, either. We could live happily in seclusion and make our art, showing it to no one other than our cats and be quite content. I know this because many before us have. A few years ago, my partner and I drove out to Santa Fe and visited The Museum of International Folk Art. I saw drawings, textiles, ceramics, paintings and dolls on display from nearly all of the world’s countries. The placards mostly bore the name “Unknown.” The objects weren’t all conventionally beautiful, but they were all precious—tiny portals into different lifetimes. While the name inscribed is “Unknown,” we might find the potter’s fingerprint somewhere on a 400 year old pot and see that the beauty of that one lifetime lives on in our own.

If we imagine an anthropologist in the future were to rummage through our wreckage, what would they make of our material culture? They might comb through the rubble of an apartment building to find our manufactured artifacts from Home Goods, but they would be unable to make any inferences about our culture from our belongings, other than that fact that we all seemed to have had a rampant shopping addiction.

If we see our art in this way, we can recognize that the limitations inflicted on us by our socioeconomic status and pace of life, and know that it is important to make art anyway. Our circumstances may seem to inhibit us from pursuing our creative endeavors, but this is illusory. We might make peace with the fact that we are time-poor, and that we are skills deficient and decide to make art in whatever way that we can. If we are lucky enough in this moment in history to have the time and the means to make art, we shouldn’t waste it. It is important that as many people as possible start making things to leave behind that tell the story of who we were; that we cared more deeply for the earth than our leaders made it seem and that we felt more deeply than the mediocre actor’s performance in a typical blockbuster film might show.

If there is anything of our spirit to be preserved, ordinary people will need to be the ones to immortalize it. The extremely wealthy are now incapable of the depth required to create or recognize enduring works of art, as they have insulated themselves from reality. A work art demands that we inject the essence of our lived experiences into it, and if one lives by the sweat and tears of others, they wouldn’t have much of their own to offer.

We need art from ordinary people that is narrative of their every day experiences. The long commute, the grocery bill, and the dishes piling up in the sink are all worthy subjects for our art. Any seasoned artist knows that divinity is always found hiding in the mundane. It appears that this has been forgotten when we scroll through artist’s reels on Instagram and find that yet another watercolor portrait of a celebrity has gone viral. This may be the easiest route one could take to get picked up by the algorithm, but the reproduction of these images is ultimately meaningless. No matter how skillfully these portraits are rendered, they are worthless to both the artist and viewer. Portraits of our neighbors, the postman, or anyone that is an actor in our daily lives would carry much more resonance.

If we are still hell bent on the importance skill, we must also accept that skill is only ever achieved after the production of many pieces of work that we will consider to be bad.

I once had a painting date with a friend of mine more naturally adept at painting than me. Due to her perfectionism, she rarely paints. When she does paint, every brush stroke coincides with an agonizing moan. This energy is distilled into the painting and reinforces her own insecurities about her art. My work during this session wasn’t technically any good, but she confessed that she envied my playfulness and freedom. Isn’t this the point of creativity—to be free?

So what are the differences between the virtuoso and the novice? The skilled painter knows that a painting is best begun in broad brush strokes with a limited range of pigments. The first layer of a painting is where basic forms and underlying structures are established. Rushing into the details too quickly will lead to unnecessary visual information that will confuse the viewer. Opening the range of pigments used to quickly will disturb the subtlety that makes a painting pleasing to look at.

A novice painter will burden themselves with the challenge of applying every detail they perceive to their canvas dutifully. They will not yet have the understanding of the principles of color theory, drawing, brushwork, composition, and they certainly won’t be able to juggle them all at once. At the beginning, the novice is likely to become flustered and declare ourselves incapable of painting and give up.

Acrylic and oil on wood panel. 2023.

Our brushwork may be clumsy, our colors garish and sense of perspective undeveloped, but this does not discredit us as artists. Many of the so called masters before us, such as Picasso, have chosen to emulate the flattened compositions of art that the people of his time called “primitive.” In doing so, Picasso challenged the established notions of what constitutes skill and artistry. He showed that raw expression, emotional depth, and conceptual innovation can hold as much—or more—value than technical finesse alone.

In my morning pages for The Artist’s Way, I often grumbled that the work I was producing felt childish. The shapes, the proportions, the subject matter, the colors I gravitated towards created a juvenile atmosphere in my pictures. There was a strong sense of embarrassment I felt about my work, which held me back from creating more work. One day I had a revolutionary idea—maybe this is just what I have to express right now. Maybe there’s something in childhood I need to return to before I can mature.

“In the beginner's mind there are many possibilities, but in the expert's there are few.”

-Shunryo Suzuki

As beginners, we often fall into the trap of comparing ourselves to the masters, thereby missing out on the joy of being new to something. There's a special freshness in our early efforts that we may yearn for once we've achieved mastery through hard work. New artists often fixate on skill and crave validation and recognition, which can stifle their creativity Art made out of this motive will be still born. We must make work for ourselves first, happily and in obscurity, to preserve ourselves within our art.