bad art

I haven't made any art for two months. I made some deliberately bad art a month ago, but then I don't know if anyone would be able to distinguish it from my other art. I wanted to be kind of punk - and do something deliberately bad....I think because I watched a documentary about Sid Vicious, who wasn't actually as vicious as his stage persona tried to portray. 

I even bought a wacom one - a pen display where you actually draw on the monitor rather than on the tablet and see what you're creating on the screen. I was pretty impressed when I first tried out the wacom one. I'm sure that at some stage I will use the wacom one. It's like when I bought my wacom intuos. After initially trying it, I stopped using it and put it away for about a year because I had this idea of what 'good' art is and I can't even make good art on paper, never mind using a tablet. 

What got me started making art again - both on paper/ sketchbooks and digital art with the intuos - was just the desire to do it and to create whatever I wanted to create however I want to create it. I put aside all the ideas about what good art is and the desire to develop skills, and just started making stuff. Some of it's not too bad. An interesting thing was that, through using my tablet and the software to make digital art, and also all kinds of pens, pencils, paints, etc in my traditional art, I did actually start to develop some skills. 

So, I encourage that approach. Do your thing. Consider Jean-Michel Basquiat. His work is brilliant and unique. He would never have created it if he was trying to be like other artists. One of the really interesting things about people like Basquiat and other profoundly gifted creators, is that they know. They know that they are really, really good - that they achieve a kind of perfection. 

What stopped me making art and doing a lot of other things two months ago is the crisis I'm going through which has pretty much shut me down. But if I live, I'm sure I'll be making art again.