I would say working in the arts, any arts really, carries a unique lesson in life in forcing us as the artists to wrestle with and engage actively with screwing up as a value. It’s a true dynamic that’s everywhere of course, but for us in art, and yes I am tooting our own horns here, we are engaged in a creative enterprise that not just requires we engage with failure, but that failure is an obvious and front-facing requisite of our growth as artists. It’s where discovery lies, it’s where our evolution in our process, whether its technical inventive or personal, flowers. It may be a series of successes that make our careers, but its the failures that lead to those successes that make us good at our art. And sometimes things fail for reasons that have nothing to do with how well you did a thing, a painting a dance, a song… those aren’t really the failures I’m talking about, though having survived oh so MANY of those particular brands of failure, let me tell you there’s lessons there too to make you better. If not in any other way than to be able to handle a project dying due to no fault of your own, like in my case the failed work on CIVIL WAR, as opposed to the failure say of my never finished but almost completely drawn and executed follow up graphic novel to SUDDEN GRAVITY, called THE CALENDAR PRIEST. Which incidentally was about a failure. You can do your best dance in this world and it still may never get seen due to some outside cock up you have no power over. It happens more often than you’d think, but today we’re going to bore down into the arc of failure and how it can terach us to be better at making substantive successes in art.

We’ve always been in a culture that rewards success over failure. We apologize for our failures, but never our successes. Our history is literally written by the winners and survivors. And we all seem to do fine more or less with this idea as a basic fundamental truth. If you screw up driving a car, a plane or a train, you can crash and hurt yourself or someone else. If you successfully survive a war you have lived to tell its tale and write that history. The lessons of success are all around us. Homo Sapiens somehow survived the Great Bottleneck and dominated the earth despite at least a dozen known other parallel species, some say by our brutality, others our way of thinking… but the successes are evident. We’re here right now as I type this and later on as you read this as proof of concept. We don’t need successes to be failures, for our failures to be successes. Both can be valuable, both can be true. One does not require the other to be so. But what art gives is an arena to engage with failure without the profound costs of losing a war or crashing that train. In the parlance of the world of the Matrix- it’s a training program where we can get better at what we’re there to learn.

This is why a grading system in art school is ridiculous and counterproductive to me. Completing the assignment- doing so for all the assignments, is all one should need to pass and all that’s required to gauge success in that academically framed environment is to do the work. We think that school teaches us but its we who teach ourselves. We pay attention to the lecture and we gain access to the knowledge its trying to imbue. We do the weird drawing assignment from our professor, hate it and fail to create something we like, proffers enormous lessons in the struggle of creating anything. Pushing the boundaries of what we are comfortable exploring to me, is the most important lesson to teach. There’s a lot of talk about the necessary value of deprogramming yourself after school. To unlearn. It seems a contradictory thing to note while also selling the idea of the lessons of an art program, but if you look past the surface of it you realize it’s trying to tell us, clumsily, that this is a practice where the journey is literally the destination.

Process is the most essential element in any creative exercise. Struggling with a medium, anatomy, visual storytelling, composition, likeness capturing, chiaroscuro, tone, color, value… these are the mini playgrounds where you get to learn how to combine them into the great amusement park of your art life. Not your career mind you, most of us don’t get that, but an artlife which we all of us have the right to access and live as we choose as artists. As a sidebar, this is the primary reason I personally find AI so repulsive, because it strips away the most important element of art making from the exercise of creating an image or a paragraph or a piece of music or whatever the non artists who create it want to sell us on it doing. It’s why a lot of us even if we can’t codify it into words effectively, find AI image making so knee jerk, uncanny valley, gross and unappealing when you look at it for more than five seconds.

While I confess that I am an absolute conscious user of social media to engage with my audience, to share my work to a wider group and to interact with the media that my work dances with as a fundamental part of running my art career, it is also a forum that celebrates success and desperately tries to ignore failures- except when it’s a cute puppy that bonks its head, or a tired baby nodding off, etc… We post only our successes there, we share only what we’re proud of. it is in a lot of ways a forum for vanity more than true full spectrum social interaction. We’re in an age now that is so involved with celebrating successes can drown out and does eclipse our way of making work. And this lesson seeps into our studios where we work, (for the record any space, desk, corner of your room where you make your art is a studio. Period). When I teach a class or even when I interact with my publishers I often see us all, including myself happy to share things we’re proud of more than the things I screwed up. we want to impress, and please. Even with people we’re playing in the sandbox with who are literally there to help us build through wrong turns to find the right direction in the project we’re working on together. I’m not trying to shame anyone or to elevate myself by any means at all. We all try to forget our failures. We take ted Lasso’s advice to be a goldfish in the wrong direction, if it’s really a philosophy that is about failure and success at all…

We need to let ourselves fail and pay the strictest attention to falling on our faces, because that’s when you find the key hidden in the dirt floor that lets you out of the dungeon. Discovery is always waiting in the shattered remains of a failure. Don’t walk away from it before you’ve scooped up as much of those revelations as you can, and never forget the essential nature of that practice. The shape and form of how we screw up is always individual and bespoke, but allowing ourselves to do so is universally important. It’s fine to showcase your successes on your Instagram, and there’s no shame in doing so- it’s probably likewise healthier for you to also post your stumbles in getting there. I am trying to do this more and more myself, though am hardly perfect at it, but that’s kind of the point of today’s article. I may fail at doing this well, but at least I succeeded in trying. But when I’ve spilled ink on my paper, or inverted something in photoshop, or let the rando dropping of a scanned in element into a pre-exisiting drawing,  I have made real and powerful discoveries at ways to make an image I would have never thought to do otherwise on my own. Failure is your tour guide to the unknown lands, and without that safari, you are bereft of those vital discovers, and worse yet, you’ll never know what you could have learned if you don’t get to experience where that failure can take you.

David Bowie said artists can be superior to regular folks in how long their are willing to sit in uncomfortable places while creating. It’s in that sustained uncomfortability, that wisdom hides and wait for you to notice it. It’s taking on a project that scares you that helps you discover what more you can achieve. The projects that I didn’t know how to solve going in, even if they cost me sleepless nights, stress and panic, are ALWAYS more rewarding when I stick the landing to them than the ones that came easy. My first Spectrum award was granted to a cover for a Criterion film I literally drew in less than an hour, and I’ve never felt less proud of an art trophy in my life as I have for that one. The projects that I think succeed beyond the pale, that I know I succeeded at because of prior failures are where the real emotional money is.  I never got a trophy for my work on The Last of Us or Dune or Meadowlark, The Lost Boy or Indeh and so on, but to me they are such essential examples of a well stuck landing that I treasure them so much more than any trophy, number of likes or shares or new social media followers could provide… because they are built on the lessons of a prior failure4. Them more than most of the others. I was put through the almost biblical level of trials in MEADOWLARK both because Ethan and I agreed to do it rather than Indeh 2, because doing a personal biographically based story about fathers and sons scared the living hell out of us both, and then having to turn down multiple increased offers to do a graphic novel for HAMILTON, even after having spoken with its creator and finding we got on creatively like a house on fire… because I chose it over that. Meadowlark made for me a literal fraction of what was on the table for Hamilton, was far less read and known about by its audience. I’d lay good odds that barely one in ten of you reading this even read or heard of my ostensibly final graphic novel. But SO much of it is born of failings as a comics storyteller, of failing at parenting, of self realization and a dozen other stumbles, it will forever be one of my most treasured experiences. If my house burned to the ground and I lost everything all the awards and art and physical evidences of my lived life, the fire could never touch this truth. That’s what we should be spending more time on, art and projects that leave us with this sensation. No one ever laid upon their death bed wishing they had won more trophies, for this reason. Be solid in getting to know the work you want to make in this life, be ferocious about chasing it down and be fearless in screwing it up along the way. You have nothing to lose but the opportunity to do it better the next time. There is no true retirement from the artlife. the work ends when you die, so you’ve got time. get out there and screw something up so you can do it again and again and know that eventually something marvelous and surprising will come from it.