Permission to Fail!!!!!

I read all of your survey responses and I started seeing some common themes between all of you. A lot of you wrote that your biggest fear was failure. Failure is something that we are taught to be afraid of because it means that you were unsuccessful. However, a lot of you may disagree with me initially, but failure is your friend.

Failure is one of the greatest teachers. Without failure you do not learn how to move forward to create something that is successful. Failure happens when you take risks. Risk taking is important when it comes to art because it helps you create something great. Even if it fails, you can learn from your mistakes and move forward to make something spectacular.

I will give you an example with my own work. Here are some drawings I have done that were relatively save and really focused on technique (which technique is very important, but you can see they are a little bland)

Now, when I showed these drawings to my professors for a critique, they said that they are well drawn, but there isn't that much going on with the idea. You can do better than this. Of course, I was upset because I invested a lot of time into these pieces, but I was disappointed that my ideas seemed week. Essentially, these drawings failed. So from here I read, researched and thought of how I can approach my ideas. I knew I wanted to talk about images of beauty and how I can make an image that was humorous, yet talked about the silly things people go through to become beautiful. So I came up with these drawings.

I decided on the idea of making a pile of something beautiful. To me piles were always something that seemed like they could be absurd like the Princess and the Pea story with her piles of mattresses. So I decided to draw piles of beautiful objects to talk about how absurd the idea of beauty can me. This was a risk because I had never made drawings like this before and I didn't know how it would go over. After I made these, I thought, "Oh this is what my professors were trying to tell me!" I showed them these drawings and they really like them. This made me very happy because I took a risk and it payed off. So failure is something to be embraced. It is a great teacher that will help you move forward!