Remembering My First Failure

I’m spending quite a bit of time these days looking back, going through old sketchbooks, browsing posts here on the blog, and remembering how I felt when I first began this journey, how I felt as I saw myself making progress, how it felt when I finally realized I could call myself an artist.

Every journey — real or metaphorical — involves a lot of “firsts” — including a first failure. Now, let me qualify this a bit. As a child, I “failed” miserably at any art project I attempted, but I don’t count those. As much as I wanted to “be an artist”, I wasn’t. I knew I wasn’t, and I had no intentions of seriously trying to become one. It was simply too far out of the realm of possibility for me, even as a hopeful, imaginative child.

As an adult — and an older one at that — I think the concept of “failure” was less daunting. When I decided to learn to draw, I did expect to fail. And, let’s be honest. I’m not a great artist. I’ll never be a great artist, and yes, I’ve had lots of failures along the way. Should you want to see any, you can take a look at these CRINGE-WORTHY FAILURES.

A concept that’s closely-related to failure is that of disappointment, and in the early days of drawing, I might have felt a bit of disappointment from time to time, but that was part of the learning process. I didn’t count those little disappointments as failures, and so I kept going.

But then came the hostas.

We had beautiful hostas growing around the trees in our yard — this was in our previous home. I’d been doing a lot of “nature drawing” — little sketches of leaves and flowers, following along in Kate Berry’s drawing book for beginners. It was a gorgeous, sunny, summer day, and I must have been feeling quite pleased with my newly-developed drawing skills because I decided to venture out and try to act like a “real artist” — not someone copying simple images from a book, but a “real artist”. You know, the sort of artist who takes a sketchbook and pencils and sits outside in the garden, drawing lovely illustrations of …. yeah, yeah, dream on.

I was definitely not a “real artist”. I recall looking at our hostas and thinking “Oh, my goodness, where am I supposed to start?” This was different than trying to copy a simple line drawing! I walked around those hostas, trying to figure out how to “see” the shapes — they kept moving, it seemed!

Was I supposed to stand up and look down? Was I supposed to sit on the ground and be at eye level? I did neither. I just stood there, mouth agape, wondering whatever made me think I could ever learn to draw!

But to my credit, I gave it a try. I did my best to focus in on one aspect of the hostas. I looked at the flowers. Oh, dear. That was worse than looking at the leaves!

Still, I gave it a try, and no, I can’t show you the drawings I made that summer afternoon because they were so awful I ripped the pages from my sketchbook — the first time I’d ever done that — and buried them so far down in the trash that they would never see the light of day.

Botanical art has always caught my eye, but I know I’m not a botanical artist. I do enjoy sketching nature, but the keyword here is sketch. It’s fun to make loose, quick sketches. And that’s what I’ve done today. Yes, I made a quick sketch of hosta flowers, just to prove to myself that I could do it.

It’s hard to see, I know. I sketched this very lightly with an “H” pencil. And I can’t begin to tell you how proud this quick little sketch makes me feel. In a way, it’s as if I’ve finally erased that “first failure” from my story, or, at least, I’ve made up for it.

Of course, this morning I sketched from a photo reference, not from life, and that is a huge difference, to be sure. But today I feel confident that I could draw hostas or other flowers from life, or at least, I could quickly sketch them. I don’t have the patience — or the desire — to create meticulous, highly-detailed botanical drawings. I’ll leave that to other artists.

Still, there are lessons here to be learned. Failure is part of any learning experience, and it would be unrealistic to expect otherwise. My first attempt at drawing from life was an absolute failure, for sure. Maybe in some ways it did set me back a bit. Maybe it dimished the confidence I’d started to build. Maybe it made me question the whole idea of “learning to draw”.

And maybe that was a good thing. Maybe that first failure helped me see things in a realistic light, helped me understand that the process might not always be easy, and maybe that horrible attempt at drawing hostas made me even more determined to eventually succeed.

Today, I can quickly sketch hostas in bloom, and I’m willing to say that if I wanted to take the time, I could probably create a reasonably good drawing of hostas, and you know what…? I could probably even do it in various different media.

Failures, no matter how devastating, don’t have to define us. Instead, they can guide us, encourage us, and inspire us.

WHAT ART FAILURES HAVE YOU EXPERIENCED?

HOW DID THEY HELP YOU BECOME A BETTER ARTIST?