Accidental flow

This is the best painting I’ve ever done. I know this because it was the only time my professor said “you’re really onto something interesting,” and the other students didn’t comment on my “process” as a way of avoiding critiquing the actual work. I count this as a win. 

I poured glue onto an art board as an experiment, which took forever to dry since I lived in a damp basement that bullied my allergies throughout grad school. I did this to play with wax resist, pushing dots and lines around the dried Elmers because I liked the squiggles it produced. In general, I toyed with technique often as a way to hide my lack of stylistic plan and ability, which is how I got the reputation for being a “process-based” artist, rather than the regular kind that makes stuff worth looking at. I told myself I was really about the clinical applications of art since I was studying to be an art therapist, and so tilted all of my creative efforts that way. But maybe that was how I kept myself afloat, surrounded by all the other students who produced gorgeous, inventive, and captivating art around me every day.

Don’t get me wrong, I was happy to be in art school at all, honestly. I knew I wasn’t as naturally talented as the other students were and had been as far as they could remember. It was clear that I hadn’t had the years of training everyone else had and was still trying to find my artistic voice and style. In a fugue state of exhaustion and bad apartment lighting, I experimented with this piece haphazardly in between homework and writing a thesis on an old computer. I used magic markers that I painted over with water to get smeared. I saw faces in the shadows that I highlighted without making sense of them. I burned candles that I periodically dripped over the images. I was working, going to school, and trying to absorb the complicated material while reassuring myself that I could handle it despite my obvious artistic deficits. I had long ago given up being any good. In this accidental way, I achieved the “nothing to lose” status so important in the world of creative flow. 

Judgment is not your friend, creatively, nor is pressure or expectation. So I zoned out and worked intermittently, sometimes getting up in the middle of the night, seeing something in the dimness and adding some color here, some watery marker there at 4 AM. I let my subconscious be random and foolish, and somehow it became the only thing I ever produced that neared “legit’ status in all of grad school. And even then I made a poor choice in the canvas, urging a classmate to note “if you’re going to make work like that you should at least do it on something more substantial.” Luckily you can always rely on someone to keep the “critical” in a “critique.” 

It represents to me a vast leap of creative faith, an embracing of my clinical abilities while seeing my artistic ventures as attempts at glimpsing the color and shape of my subconscious. It emerged organically with no input from my rational mind and won the “approval lottery” at the same time, a win-win. But is it any good? Away from the judging eyes and the arbitrary hierarchy that exists in the world of art critiques, where does it fall, exactly? Who decides that part?