Thirty years in and I still learn more from a ruined piece than a finished one
Dropped a three-foot welded steel piece on the studio floor yesterday. My own fault. Sloppy rigging on the hoist, clip let go around head height. It bent where I'd spent a week getting the line right and I wanted to throw the whole thing in the scrap bin.
Left it sitting there overnight instead. Came in this morning and the failure is obvious now. The foot wasn't plumb before the drop, it was just welded well enough to fool me. Ground it out, re-cut, re-welded. It's better now than it was yesterday before it fell.
That's the part nobody tells you about this work. The disasters teach you more than the wins ever do, if you can stand to look at them the next morning instead of smashing them to pieces. I've had a ruined bronze teach me more about wall thickness than any book.
Anyone else got a piece that failed and came back stronger?
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I love this. It's not the same medium at all but I had a painting do this to me last month, or I guess I did it to the painting. I'd spent a whole weekend on a sky I was proud of and then knocked over a cup of coffee right across the lower half before it was dry. I was so mad I nearly threw it out. Left it overnight and came back and honestly, the sky was never the problem, it was fine. But the foreground that I'd been avoiding? The ruined part forced me to finally just repaint it and it's one of the better pieces I've done. Funny how we need the accident to see what we were hiding from.
Do you think it's just that we stop being precious about it once it's already "ruined" so we finally take risks? That's kind of what it felt like for me.
The coffee thing is almost too perfect, honestly. That you'd been avoiding the foreground, and then the universe (or your own elbow) made the decision for you. I know exactly that feeling of being secretly relieved when something forces the thing you didn't want to face.
I get a version of this with editions. There's always one print in the run that smudges or misregisters, and my first instinct is to pulp it. But half the time I end up keeping the failure as a kind of proof of the process, a record of the moment the plate fought back. It tells me more about what I was actually doing than the clean ones do.
My etching teacher used to say the plate never lies, only the printer learns to. I think about that whenever I want to blame the materials.
That print thing rings true. The plate that fights you is the one telling you something. Most people would never keep a misregister, but you're right, it's proof of the moment. I keep a few ruined welds on a shelf for the same reason. Reminders of where I got sloppy so I don't do it again.
Editions are a different kind of patience than what I do. One bad pull and you've got a decision to make about the whole run. I respect that you don't just pulp it, that you let the failure stand as evidence. That's harder than fixing it.
The sky story gets it exactly. You spend all that effort on the part you're comfortable with and the accident points at the part you were dodging. My piece was the same way. The line looked fine because I didn't want to look closer. The drop just made me honest.
Different materials, same lesson. Knowing when something's actually done is the whole game and the wreckage is usually what teaches you. Glad the coffee did you a favor, even if it didn't feel like it at the time.