The Magic of Failing Miserably
Experimenting means treating your imagination to a strong dose of reality.
Apple (1914), Pablo Picasso
You know how I keep advocating for experimentation — feeling your way forward, figuring things out as you go along, trying new things? Well, that approach is biting me on the ass right now.
I signed up for a drawing class. I wanted to take an oil painting class, but I figured I should start at the very beginning before I started wasting expensive paint. But unfortunately, my drawing class doesn’t include colored pencils or sketching or charcoals. We aren’t even drawing faces or animals. We aren’t drawing houses or landscapes or even cartoons of angry squirrels (my personal passion).
Nope. We sharpen our pencils — boring, regular PENCILS!!! — and we sit and stare at an apple and try to draw it. APPLES ARE SO BORING. And then we try very, VERY hard to shade in the shadows and erase some highlights and… Listen, I can’t even use words to describe what we have to do, because I have no fucking idea what’s going on. For two hours I sit there feeling confused and failing, over and over and over again.
I like my teacher but she isn’t the most verbal person. I think she’s been an illustrator for so long that she can’t remember how to put any of it into words. She just sits there and draws an apple and shades it in as we’re watching. Occasionally she says things like, “Now I’m shading.” and "Do it sort of like this.” and “Let’s capture the shadows now.”
Then we have to try. (TRY WHAT, EXACTLY? HOW?!!!) She walks around the room and says stuff like “Maybe make smaller strokes.” or “This looks a little hairy.” Then she asks to take each person’s pencil and she corrects what they’re doing. “Like this,” she says. “See?”
No, I don’t see. I have no idea what she’s doing or how. But I still say to myself, “Make it less hairy!” As if I understand! And then I try and fail to make anything less hairy.
I don’t blame the teacher. Mostly, I’m amazed at how terrible I am at drawing. DRAWING!! I THOUGHT I WAS PRETTY GOOD AT DRAWING!!! WHO KNEW DRAWING WAS SO HARD?!!!!
Yesterday when I got home, I called my friend.
“I thought drawing would be fun,” I told her. “But as it turns out, drawing is not fun at all. In fact, drawing makes writing look like hot sex.”
“Well, it sounds like you are learning something important,” she said.
***
Every week on Wednesday morning, I think about skipping my drawing class. Why should I go? What’s the point? Two hours of torment, that I paid money for?!!
I thought it would be relaxing and meditative. I thought we would get to sit behind giant easels and draw naked people in huge strokes. I thought we would be able to MAKE BOLD LINES WITH BIG MESSY CHARCOAL STICKS. I thought the room would be packed with hot, skinny men with strange facial hair, not retired women who seem to dislike drawing just as much as I do.
I’ve never taken an art class as an adult, outside of pottery classes. I probably should’ve done a little research before I signed up, but I liked the feeling of leaping into something I knew nothing about. If the experience was jarring, all the better! I wanted to do something completely new and unknown.
What a ridiculous choice!
But I’m honestly surprised by my lack of improvement. And I’m stunned by how little explanation we’re being offered. Yesterday the woman next to me was very confused and I actually had to explain to her what was happening, because after puzzling over it for a solid five minutes, I finally figured it out.
“I’m very good at math, and this makes no sense,” the woman said.
“The angle is steeper than it should be, because you’re not drawing a cube with 90-degree angles,” I said. “You’re drawing how it looks from a very specific angle and distance away. So the angle gets steeper or less steep depending on where you are in relation to the object.”
“Oh!” she said. “I get it! I was so stuck inside my preconceptions!”
“Me, too,” I said.
***
It’s hard not to get stuck inside your preconceptions. But I know now that I don’t want to waste countless hours trying to learn how to draw. Because I don’t like practicing drawing at all. It feels like wasted time. In fact, while I’m drawing, all I can think about is all of the other things I’d rather be doing.
It’s funny (and a little jarring) to remember that experimenting doesn’t mean deciding on something and then doing it better and better from that point forward. Experimenting means fucking around and finding out. That means you might discover that you love something, or you might discover that you hate it. You might succeed immediately or you could fail repeatedly. You might hate it and then eventually learn to love it.
Experimentation lays bare your assumptions after the fact. I realize now that I assumed that I was someone who would LOVE to draw. I imagined that I’d be GREAT at it immediately. I thought I’d be drawing beautiful, realistic trees overnight. I pictured the teacher walking over and saying, “My god, you really have a talent for this! You have to keep going, you’re an absolute prodigy!”
Trying something out shows you what your true priorities are. By sitting and drawing for two hours every week, I’ve cultivated gratitude for how much I love to write. It can be easy to forget how much I love it, because I write so much every week and I’m always pressuring myself to write more.
Maybe I need to stop asking myself for MORE. Maybe it’s time to write less and enjoy it more. Maybe I need prioritize a few important projects and let the rest go.
***
I have to admit, I’m actually starting to relish how much I hate my drawing class.
I think I can relish hating it because I’m not ashamed or anxious about how shitty I am at drawing. Learning how to make pottery over the past three years has taught me how to be bad at something for a long time. Now I’m fine with it.
It’s obvious which women in the drawing class feel anxious about being bad at drawing. The anxious ones keep groaning and then saying “I think I’m getting a little better!” and then groaning again.
So here’s the big lesson underneath all of these other lessons: It’s fine not to get better. It’s fine to just stay bad at a thing. It goes against every lesson you’ve ever learned, but the fact is, what matters the most is enjoyment.
What I enjoyed the most in my last drawing class was explaining to the confused woman next to me what was going on.
You have to abandon what’s inside your head, I said. You have to forget everything that came before. You have to look at something for a long time, until you recognize that it’s not what you imagined.
You have to let go of what you imagined, and work with reality instead.
Thanks for reading Ask Polly! What are you bad at that you still enjoy a lot? What are you good at that you’ve stopped enjoying? How do you locate meaning, connection, and pleasure in doing what you love? Do you have to remind yourself how to enjoy things sometimes? I have to run out to watch my mom play pickleball in a tournament this morning, but then I’ll be back and I really want to discuss this with everyone, so step right up and tell me about how you navigate your own interests, passions, hobbies, and experiments!
do not laugh at me but i actually thought YOU DREW hte apple at the top of the email. like you'd improved at it, and this is what you came up with. only after i read the whole thing did i look back and see it was PICASSO. i know that is beside your whole point burt HAHAHA.
I'm a professional artist with an art degree and I HATE having people tell me how to draw. Every time I take a class, it's a battle. I'm always like...ok, that's how YOU draw, but what does it have to do with me?
I've managed to pick up a few tricks from teachers here and there over the years, but most of my career has been choosing to be bad at art my own way rather than be good at art someone else's way.
Polly, I think the people who are commenting saying "you could be good at drawing with a different learning approach" are technically correct, but also wrong about something important. If someone truly desires to draw, and if drawing was their true medium, they would already be drawing. Nothing could even STOP them from drawing. It's like you with writing. Somehow it always happens, in some form. Obviously there are some people who pick up sketching as an enjoyable/meaningful hobby later in life, but there's always something a bit contained about that kind of art which doesn't appeal to me. I love the art that is so desperate to come out, it's happy to be wrong while it does it.