Make a Bad Painting

For my first official blog post on this website, I would like to share a story. One time when I was a child as a Christmas gift or something similar, I received a large wolf paint-by-number board. It was big and filled with tiny spots which had to be precisely painted in the hopes that it would turn into a painting as beautiful as the one on the box. I was pretty small, all things considered, for such a meticulous task. I would have been maybe seven or eight. But I embarked on my quest full of confidence. I dipped the cheap paintbrushes into cheaper paint and tried to bring forth a beautiful painting. At first it was going swimmingly. I was accurately painting and it was coming together slowly but surely.

Then, when I expected it least, disaster struck. I painted a little too far into another marked blob. Well how could I possibly fix that? The solution seemed simple. A rag could probably clean that right up. Fortunately I had a rag and some paint water right there. This was a no-brainer. Unfortunately, the flimsy printed canvas had other opinions. As I started wiping with a damp rag, the paper layers started warping and ripping and suddenly rather than a small mistake I had a very ruined canvas. Distraught, I went to tell my mother. But she was watching a movie with the rest of my family and told me to sit down and watch and we would figure it out later. In absolute agony of conscience and mind I watched BBC’s Planet Earth, certain that I had destroyed something very important. 

Sometime later (it felt like a very, very long time later) my mother examined the paint-by-number and declared that she could fix it. It was unbelievably good news. In reality most of what I’d done was made a very small portion of spaces unreadable and thanks to a guide in the box, my mother was able to paint in the waterlogged spots.

Yet after that, it didn’t quite feel right to touch the painting anymore. I tried a few times, but it was suddenly too nerve wracking. While before I was filled with confidence, now I was uncertain and scared. I didn’t want to mess it up. Many years and several moves later, I dug the painting up again. It was still unfinished, my small progress amounting to barely anything. I had spent years being scared of messing up painting, and as a result it could hardly even be classified as a painting. 

I decided I didn’t like that, so I finished it. And it doesn’t look anything like it was supposed to. It doesn’t even really look like a good painting. But there’s paint on the canvas and I can say, “I did that.” 

A lot of times an art goal seems too lofty or too crazy or like it requires too much skill, but in reality it doesn’t even exist if you don’t make it. A bad painting that you actually made is a thousand times better than an incredible painting that never makes it into reality.