i keep a box of things that didn't work
not a sketchbook, not a journal. it's a cardboard box under my worktable. failed experiments, pieces i started and hated halfway through, collages that just wouldn't lay right. things i cut up and tried to save and made worse.
i told myself i was keeping them to learn from. but honestly i think i just can't throw them away. they're like artifacts of a version of me that was trying something and missed. feels wrong to trash that.
pulled one out today. a painting i abandoned last february. thick muddy acrylics, wrong composition, everything fighting everything. i scraped at it with a palette knife for a while and something actually started to happen. might not save it but it's not dead yet either.
anyone else keep the ugly ones around?
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I've got a box like this. It's a plastic crate actually, lives under the cutting table. Half-finished mosaics, pieces where the andamento went wrong, tiles I spent hours cutting that just looked dead once they were set. Can't throw them out either.
I pulled one out a few months ago, a portrait in smalti I abandoned in 2019. The face was stiff, the colours were off, everything about it annoyed me. But I realised looking at it that the reason it failed was the reason I got better. You can't learn that from something that worked.
Also, there's something else nobody talks about: sometimes a failed piece is just waiting. Not for you to fix it, but for you to see it differently. I took that stiff portrait, smashed half the face out, reset it completely different. It's one of my favourites now.
The box has value. Keep it.
that bit about the reason it failed being the reason you got better, yeah, that's it exactly. you can't reverse-engineer that from a finished piece. the failures carry the actual information.
also i love that you said "andamento" like i'd know what that means. had to google it. now i'm down a rabbit hole on mosaic directionality. this is how i lose my afternoons.