Experimenting to find the magic
Saturday Night Experiment #1, acrylic and pencil on paper
One of the most valuable skills I’ve acquired over the years is the permission to experiment.
Experimenting is different from trying to produce a perfect completed product. Experimenting, in my experience, has been crucial to helping me find my way through so much in my life, creatively and otherwise. Although all of it is creative, really. Yes, there’s the skill and care that a professional artist needs to create a body of work. Experimenting is how they got there in the first place.
I remember the day a wise teacher reminded me that it was necessary to do this.
As a new freshman at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, I was nervous about doing the homework that one of my studio art teachers assigned. My overactive brain was a little anxious when she told us to bring pieces to class next week based on this assignment. How, I wondered, was I going to make art for class that was Good, Complete, and most of all, made me feel like a Real Artist and not a fraud? Because in a studio art class, everyone shows their work to the group, and we all discuss it. I was a little freaked out, and obviously a bit insecure.
My teacher, sensing that a few of us were going into failure over producing something perfect, said “just experiment with this, nothing has to be finished or beautiful or perfect. Make a lot of experiments!”. ‘Wow’, I thought to myself, ‘that actually sounds like fun!’. And as quickly as the anxiety about making something Good evaporated, the creativity and play came back. I was able to learn something valuable working on that assignment, and more importantly, for my life in general.
“All life is an experiment. The more experiments you make the better.”
Saturday Night Experiment #2, acrylic and pencil on paper
Experimenting wasn’t a new concept for me, not by a long shot. I’d simply forgotten, as I stepped into the seriousness of adulthood and college, that I needed it more than ever.
Since I was a wee creative child, I’d experimented and improvised all the time while playing and coloring and inventing games. Children often have permission to do this, to just make stuff up, and in doing so, they find magic and make brilliant discoveries. It’s one of the best ways to learn. The problem is that as we get older, we forget that moodling about like this is time well spent.
If something starts out being an experiment, there’s a lot less pressure for it to be successful or good. It has a freedom, without the pressure of having to become a certain thing. An experiment is simply that - a discovery, as in “what can I learn that I don’t already know?”. This is necessary for new growth and discoveries. Scientists know about this, you do too.
There’s so many things to discover that have simply not been found or seen yet. An experiment can yield fascinating and satisfying results, if it’s allowed to simply be.
Recent experiments from my sketchbook. I love these colors and will certainly make a bigger painting using them.
As an artist and a human being growing and creating my life every day, I am reminding myself of the value to be found in making lots of experiments.
As a psychic teacher, one of the things I find myself telling my students regularly is this: “it’s an experiment! Just read what you see - you don’t have to be perfect or get it right, it’s okay to not be right!”.
In order to grow, we must find a space where it’s okay to fail. Experiments are not expected to produce an expected result - they are a try out, an exploration into a new direction, a ‘what if?’.
The way I see it now is that no experiment is a failure. Just by showing up and taking a risk, you succeed. Maybe you’ll even discover something magical along the way. I will be forever grateful to the art teacher who reminded me of something important that I knew inherently as a child.
