A Year of Making Art, Day 129: Making Bad Art to Get to the Good Art

August 26, 2007  Day 129

Bored, restless, irritated and burned out is how I felt when I started this morning's drawing.  First, I looked at yesterday's effort:  Ugh.  I don't want to do that again, I thought, so I started with a bright red, my favorite color.  But the composition went nowhere and pretty soon, even color couldn't save this attempt.

   Drawing #131  11" x 14"

How much bad art do I have to make in order to get to the good art?  Yesterday's painting session revealed another weird result.  I was still painting over an old canvas, trying to get the new to merge with the old, and ended up here:

  Canvas 18  40" x 40"

This painting originally looked like this:

  Canvas 18 in a prior life 

Everything I've been doing lately has been doomed to failure.  Yesterday I took some short test videos with my Nikon Coolpix 8700 digital camera, and could not get them to play back on my computer.  In the process, I messed up the camera settings I usually use to photograph paintings for my website and blog. 

After struggling with the impenetrable manual for an hour or two, I gave up.  Pushing buttons too fast without thinking has gotten me into trouble before, and I'm sure it will  in the future.  I tackled the manual again this morning, and I think I've got it fixed now.  But I still can't get any software on my computer to read the video files correctly.  Yet a year ago I made several videos that work fine.  What am I doing wrong?

Adrian suggested I ask Stan Bowman, my printmaker, for help.  "Isn't he an expert photographer?"

"Yeah," I said.  "Maybe as a last resort."

(Note:  There is a gap between the dates I'm writing and posting in order to give me time to get ahead in case we travel and I'm not able to post.)