Error and Art

I have these pieces of watercolor paper that have backstopped my small splatter paintings for months. As part of my policy of paying attention to as much of the painting process as possible - metartcognition? - I was tempted to mess around. So I cut out some pieces and impulsively glued them onto a card I had painted. It seems like a natural dimension to explore. But I didn't like the outcome and it is possible to think of the card and cutouts as spoiled. Which led me to think about why I don't like the outcome. It's an uncomfortable feeling. It's like a kind of itch. And the only way to scratch it is to either fix it or start over and do it more to my liking.

I've written about how educational institutions reward success but don't deal with the productive potential of failure, an important part of learning: "Making is a Stance Toward Learning". In tinkering and in coding, the project very often doesn't work at first. Failure leads to debugging -- to looking closely enough at process and product to understand what went wrong. In painting, to me, that means using a failure as a jumping off point into a new creative dimension. For one thing, I didn't choose areas of the cutout to contrast specifically with the background painting. For another thing, I will sketch and consider shapes of cut-outs and how they relate to each other before my next venture into this dimension. We will see. Literally,