Making Bad Art

Give yourself permission

I stopped Performing Presence twelve days in.

A month off social media, documented daily on Substack. That was the plan. I made it twelve days and then I stopped. Not because I failed. Because it wasn’t telling the story I needed to tell. It wasn’t doing what I needed for myself.

And that is okay.

I am sharing this because I think artists need to hear it more. Not the polished version of the story. The real one. The one where you try something and it doesn’t work and you stop and that is not the end of anything.

Every artwork is a learning process. Some are good, some are bad, some are somewhere in between and you still cannot tell which even after they are done. Not every piece is going to be a masterpiece. Not every piece is going to be finished, perfect, resolved, ready to show. Most of them are not. Most of them are just the next thing you had to make so you could get to the one after that.

A professor once told me it takes ten paintings to make one good one. That landed. It gave me permission to make the bad ones without treating them like evidence of something wrong with me. Because that is the trap, right? We think the bad piece means something about us as artists. It doesn’t. It means we are working.

Day four of this month I sat down with an idea and it didn’t work. I could feel it while it was happening. That thing where you keep pushing hoping it will turn a corner and it just doesn’t. And then somewhere in the not-working, another idea arrived. A better one. One I wouldn’t have found without going through the bad one first.

That is always how it goes. The bad piece is not a detour from the practice. It is the practice.

Every artwork is a structure. A scaffolding. You build on it or you take it apart and use the materials for something else. Nothing is wasted. The bad piece teaches you what the good one needs to know. The unfinished performance teaches you what the next one needs to be. The abandoned idea clears the way for the idea that was waiting behind it.

We put so much pressure on every single thing we make. Every piece has to justify the time, the materials, the showing up. But that is not how creativity works. That is not how any of this works. You need all of them. The bad ones, the weird ones, the almost-theres, the complete disasters. They are all part of the same long conversation you are having with your practice.

Give yourself permission to make the bad art. Give yourself permission to stop something when it stops serving you. Give yourself permission to try and not finish and call that progress because it is.

Twelve days. Not thirty. Still counts.

Make the bad art. Stop when you need to stop. Keep going.

My early artwork from about 1978