Process But No Progress

In other words, I want to talk about failure.

Now I do know that there really isn't supposed to be failure in making art - failures are mistakes and experiments.  And that you don't know how something is going to work out unless you try to put it together.  However, I reserve the right, as the artist who made something, to call something a failure when I really, really dislike it.  And that's the case with the piece in focus today.

In the Art Challenge I've been doing, one of the assignments was Dreams.  Now I'm sure most people would like to paint the things they are dreaming of doing, their goals and wishes.  Others would want to paint their dreams.  Which is all good.  

Sometimes dreams are nightmares, though, which can be the case with me.  In the past 2-3 weeks I've been having an uptick in nightmares and bad dreams, based on some psychiatric work I'm doing.  Anyway, the piece I really wanted to do was a riff off a Peter Gabriel song, called "Biko."  Stephen Biko was an anti-apartheid activist who was killed in 1977 while in police custody, and his story was immortalized in the film "Cry Freedom."  You can see the video for the song (a live performance of the song by Gabriel interspersed with scenes from the film here.  

Anyway, I wanted to use a line from the song as inspiration or include it as a quote within the piece which is, "When I try to sleep at night/I can only dream in red/The outside world is black and white/With only one color dead."  I figured it would make a great piece.

The red for me signified blood, but I didn't want to use a bright red color for it.  Instead I was more interested in dried blood, that dark red that you get.  I wasn't sure how to mix it, so I purchased tubes of red oxide and another deep red crimson.  Checking out the tubes, I wasn't very happy with the color, it was still not what I wanted.  So I mixed paint over and over and finally came up with a red I could accept - sort of

I didn't like how it looked on the canvas, really, but decided to try to work with it.  For the white color, again I didn't want a stark white but wanted really a flesh tone, or something close to it.  So once again I mixed paint - titanium white, pink, gray, and gold.  Didn't get quite what I wanted, but again decided to work with it.

Not at all what I wanted at the time, but looking back maybe this would work....  That canvas got put aside.  Then I tried another canvas

REALLY BAD, in my opinion, and I made it worse by adding black (which of course I doctored up to try to make it more of a brown-black)

Seriously?  That got dumped.

Yet another attempt that got dumped

I realized that part of the problem was that I was trying to make it look way too busy.  I was a tad overenthusiastic with stencils and the like.

So I tried a more minimalist approach on watercolor paper that I figured I could just toss if I didn't like it.  This was the version I chose to submit for the challenge

I don't like this either.  At all.  I still want to work with the line from the song, but I will definitely start over and try something different.  Maybe with paper instead of paint.  We'll see.

However, I did want you to see that not everything works the way you want it to, and sometimes a work of art really is a failure.  I did learn a lot from this, though, especially in the area of mixing colors.  This is a process I love, and I do realize that there are artists who prefer to use ready made colors.  Which does protect against wastage, I know.

In any event, I'd love to hear you share some of your 'failures' in art.  Let's commiserate together!

later,

lin