Perfection

 

Perfection

    As a child, my parents drummed into me: “If it’s worth doing, it’s worth doing well!”  This implies perfection, and is a platitude that most of us can relate to. For years, I believed it. They were my parents. I know I’m not alone. Believing this has caused paralysis in a lot of people. It makes a lot of people afraid to try new things because they might not be perfect. What we fail  (there’s that word) to realize, however, is that if we were afraid to be imperfect, we would never have learned to walk, to speak, to think, or even to do somersaults.

    When I was teaching high school English composition, I had students who couldn’t put even a single word on a page because it might not be the right word. They were paralyzed mentally. Sometimes this was the result of overwhelmingly high expectations by parents. I was never sure why they were afraid to fail, but whatever the reason, they were paralyzed. 

    I see this among new painters, too, in the classes I take at the local community college. Making the wrong brush stroke is so terrifying, they don’t paint anything and instead of failing by trying, they fail through inaction.

    I paint most days. And I have at least a couple paintings going at a time. If I get to a point that the paint has to dry before I can continue, I have another painting to work on. 

    When I start, I don’t worry about that first stroke. Frequently I have sketched. More usually I have an image in my mind. (I hasten to add that the image on the canvas never matches the image in my head.) Sometimes, at the end of the day, I have paint I don’t want to waste so I smear it on a fresh canvas. And occasionally that sparks a painting. 

    Before I paint, I slap on a thin coat of ochre or raw sienna. I don’t start with a pristine canvas. It’s already imperfect, and I can’t make a mistake with it. I just paint. If it doesn’t work or I am not happy with the result, I have choices:

• I can paint over the mistakes. I do that with every single canvas, I have to admit. 
• If the painting is beyond help, even after re-painting, I can cover it with gesso, which is a base coat on raw canvas - or in this case a new base coat on the crappy painting I don’t like. I do this a lot. 
• My third option, one I use less frequently, is to rip the canvas off the stretchers and put new canvas on. Suddenly I have a brand new canvas to either succeed or fail with. 

    After I wrote this first blog, I read it over. I deleted a couple whole paragraphs. I moved some things around. I added and changed some words. My first draft was not perfect. Too bad. This one probably isn’t either. 

    But perfection is overrated. And in painting, as in writing, nothing has to be permanent. Give yourself some grace and mercy. I do.