what I learned when I stopped trying to be good at art

pick a forgiving medium, then keep going

For the last three months I have been drawing a comic about my day, every day. For some reason, it remains an undisciplined, uncomplicated project that continues to bring me joy. It is easy, even. This is more mystifying by the fact that I have failed countless times to develop any kind of 'creative practice' in my adult life. This repetitive, unimpressive failure is what I am familiar with:

Have you ever crawled away from some aspirational hobby or work or souped up basement project, wounded and pissed off about the state of your creative mind, ashamed by your shabby discipline, convinced of your pathetic self, like me, dumping the pastels under the coffee table, dragging home a $25 dollar electric typewriter purchased off Facebook Marketplace in a fit of agency before leaving it to gather dust on my living room floor — has that ever been you?

John Moore, Quitting Time, 2015. Oil on linen.

For years prior, I have tried similar undertakings and experiments with the question of, what would happen if I drew every day? Even in earlier sketchbooks — that question, drawn out hopefully, and 6-month long gaps in between where it goes unanswered. Like, literally look:

aug 24 2023 and mar 7 2024. years go by!

My belief was that a lot of interesting and unpredictable things would happen to me if I started drawing every day. I believe, and still do, that doing something creative every day that feels important to you will propel you towards some unknown, brilliant direction. Still I have failed hundreds of times at trying to draw every day. And now I do it, easily. This is a list of thoughts that attempts to deconstruct why. This is also the longer, more developed form of a talk I first gave at New Works in Progress.

talking about comics!

The main ideas are picking a forgiving medium that you are okay with producing crappy work in. And then sustaining momentum over time. A series of events stopped me from falling off drawing comics when I was at risk: I showed some friends and they liked the comics, my boyfriend wanted to see them every day. I left the sketchbook open on the coffee table so I'd see it beckoning. Eventually the process became less about drawing comics and more about noticing joy.

This post has a lot of pictures (yay!), but that means that to view the whole thing, you'll need to read this outside of your email. You can read the full post by clicking on the post title if you're reading this in email.

ways to develop a daily creative practice

pick a forgiving medium

1. Before landing on comics, I considered what creative practice would be sustainable. I've tried to write daily poems before. I've tried to make daily illustrations. I like a lot of different mediums. But different mediums have different costs. Throwing clay on the wheel — you have to commute to a studio, you learn how to throw, you have to buy clay, you figure out how to dispose of it. Drawing by hand, though, you can do on the coffee table in between work meetings with dollar store pens. Comics can be like poetry — they are economical in energy and time. You can write poetry on the train, on your phone while waiting in line. Like Audre Lorde said:

Of all the art forms, poetry is the most economical. It is the one which is the most secret, which requires the least physical labor, the least material, and the one which can be done between shifts, in the hospital pantry, on the subway, and on scraps of surplus paper. Over the last few years, writing a novel on tight finances, I came to appreciate the enormous differences in the material demands between poetry and prose. — Audre Lorde, Sister Outsider

2. Comics are interesting, too, because there is a lot to play with, even when you are an amateur. It is a very forgiving medium, different from a crappy painting or a crappy song. Comics are uniquely forgiving:

   1. Frames, borders, dialogue, speech, sound, illustration, sequence, time: there are a lot of things you can fall back on if you're not sure what to talk about, not sure what to draw, not sure how to draw. You can still write, you can still tell a story.

   2. Comics can be crappy: Let's just say if you watched a movie where all the characters just talked in a kitchen to each other the entire movie you'd have one camp putting the movie in their Letterboxd Top 4 movies of all time and another camp calling it a plotless gratuitous jerkoff and you should kill yourself if you enjoyed it. The movie gets a 98% on Rotten Tomatoes for some reason. With a crappy comic, you're like, okay I forgive you. This is redeemable and so are you.

   3. There is a certain generosity in receiving a comic. Even you think they are bad, or pointless, you can still enjoy them. A bunch of my comics are just about the meals I made or ate that day. Not even good meals. And yet, stacked up with all the other comics I've drawn from the week they form some kind of mural that makes me stunned to look at. I am living. I have been through time just like the rest of you.

so many pages of comics!

3. I love to laugh. I think it is one of the most important things you can do as a human being. It is sometimes the only way you can make sense of what is going on. And sometimes the only way to face anger, sorrow, shame, futility. In therapy, I am wiping my snot and then laughing. I couldn't find the tinfoil two days ago (hidden under the parchment paper) and started crying out of stress, and then laughed about it right after while my boyfriend held me. Humour allows you to access truths you might not otherwise be able to access. You suffer, you laugh, then you admit: it's funny because it's true!

4. Comics allow you to access a 'different register' of thinking or expression, almost intuitively: I could just as well have written something about how much I love music, or how music gets things across, etc. etc. but instead I drew this comic. It resonates differently than if I were to just tell you about my love for music or what music accomplishes. Instead you just get the point because we're already talking to each other across the comic.

5. This is like the idea of accessing a different register in poetry. Li Young Lee talked about this at the Kundiman retreat:

"Suddenly, when we hear poetry, that's a different bandwidth. We would never hear that bandwidth if it weren't for poetry…That's one of the services of poetry. We get to hear what the human mind sounds like when it's fused, when it's inhabited, by powers bigger than itself." — Li Young Lee

6. A great example of poetry accessing a different register: Gregory Orr's To Be Alive, merely a five-line poem. When he was 12 Orr shot and killed his younger brother in a hunting accident; certainly there could have been a thousand ways to express what he is expressing here. And yet — this is the best, no, the only way he could have expressed this feeling. I could tell you that life is important, wrap things up in a metaphor, tell you point blank that joy is the point of it all, and still those feel cheap compared to just reading the fucking poem. Sometimes the form is how you get across the river.

So yes, picking a medium can make a great big difference, with their own nuances and costs. What are you able to realistically sustain, and how can you begin to sustain that practice over time?

create and maintain momentum, discipline, and joy

Over the course of my experiment, I kept drawing because I had momentum. Some things that helped with creating and maintaining this momentum:

1. Drawing by hand in a notebook keeps you from stopping: I can't undo when I make a mistake. I can only keep moving forward, draw over pen lines, colour things in, work through mistakes. This forces you to keep moving forward with the work.

2. Don't avoid mistakes: My sketchbook is full of mistakes. I make a mistake almost every time I draw a daily comic. The stakes are not high. I only need to complete it. It doesn't need to be good. Failed work, actually, is essential:

"The function of the overwhelming majority of your artwork is simply to teach you how to make the small fraction of your artwork that soars. One of the basic and difficult lessons every artist must learn is that even the failed pieces are essential. X-rays of famous paintings reveal that even master artists sometimes made basic mid-course corrections (or deleted really dumb mistakes) by overpainting the still-wet canvas. The point is that you learn how to make your work by making your work, and a great many of the pieces you make along the way will never stand out as finished art. The best you can do is make art you care about — and lots of it!" David Bayles & Ted Orland, Art and Fear

3. Look at proof of your work: Drawing in a sketchbook is immediate feedback. Every day I draw a comic, I see the months' worth of comics before. So I’ve basically already done the majority of the work when I sit down to draw a daily comic. By drawing, you immediately add to your own personal canon. You want to see what comes next, so you draw. You want to see more comics, so you draw. The daily work becomes the necessary and intuitive step towards the next interesting thing you make. Holding a sketchbook in my hands full of comics is real proof.

4. Doing the work teaches you how to do the work: Every day what you work on teaches you how to do the work that you need to do in the future. My work tomorrow is more informed by what I've done today. Annie Dillard talks about the blank page and how acting is better than not:

"The page, the page, that eternal blankness, the blankness of eternity which you cover slowly, affirming time’s scrawl as a right and your daring as necessity; the page, which you cover woodenly, ruining it, but asserting your freedom and power to act, acknowledging that you ruin everything you touch but touching it nevertheless, because acting is better than being here in mere opacity; the page, which you cover slowly with the crabbed thread of your gut¹; the page in the purity of its possibilities; the page of your death, against which you pit such flawed excellences as you can muster with all your life’s strength: that page will teach you to write." Annie Dillard, The Writing Life

5. I didn't really mean to, but I got better without trying. The top comic is one of the first comics I ever drew. The second one is a couple months later. I didn't really set out with improving my sense of composition, comedic timing, expressions, line quality, colour, etc. They just happened intuitively. The work teaches you.

6. It has been unlike anything else to be able to see, in my own renderings, the moments from my life. They are not the most significant moments or sometimes even joys from the day. They are just a joy, a moment, that I chose, for some reason or another, to document. Over time these comics form a tapestry of the days, weeks, months. I am watching my existence write itself out, in joy, in style. It is like a personal photo album, but I made many more choices to get here.

7. Make for one specific audience: Of course, joy for yourself is still not foolproof. I have done a lot of things I enjoy that I've stopped. Your heart changes, you forget what used to bring you joy. It was only once I stated to draw with the reason of making my partner laugh every day did the act of drawing become routine, almost easy. My boyfriend moved in with me and I started drawing comics. Sometimes he sidles up to me, puppy-like, asking about when the next edition of his favourite comic’ll be ready. It became easy, almost unthinkable to not try to make him laugh. This is not that you shouldn’t make art for yourself. These comics are as much for me as for him. But I continue because they make him laugh.

8. Perhaps that is the thing about discipline with creativity. The point is not to make something good every day. You will not make something good every day. Actually, most of the stuff you make will be kind of crappy. But it is essential to the work that you are going to make in the future. So to get there you have to make the crappy stuff now. You will miss some days when you are sick, when you are too tired or sad to continue. It doesn't matter. The path is still there; you pick up the pen and keep drawing. No one else will do it for you. No one else will get to feel all this joy.

   

thank you for reading as always 💗

1. ???? amazing phrase