“Try again. Fail again. Fail better”. This is a quote by absurdist writer Samuel Becket that is usually interpreted in a negative way, but I see it as actually positive.
First, let me preface that by saying that I am no great fan of Becket. His existentialist plays are among the most boring things ever produced by mankind. I don't go so much to the theatre — it is expensive and usually disappointing these days — but I like reading plays. And I even enjoyed reading plays of some absurdist authors, such as Ionesco. But Becket's plays are boring even as reading material. Almost as boring as waiting for Godot himself. But — well, I like that sentence. It's a good one.
Applied to art, or really to any process that requires extended effort, it means that you are going to fail many times, but eventually are going to improve as well. You learn by failing. You are always going to fail, there is no such thing as a complete success, but it is slowly going to get better. In the end, all you can do is get closer to an ideal, which functions as a lighthouse guiding you, more than a final objective. Which reminds me of another quote, I think by painter Salvador Dali: “Do not be afraid of perfection. You will never reach it". He was a megalomaniac bastard, but he was right.
I am very far from perfection, or even from attaining a decent quality, but I see that there has been at least some improvement in my painting, and that is, at least for now, sufficient. Each new painting builds on the lesson of the previous failure and becomes better. This happens even on the same painting: I usually tend to work in layers and each version becomes better or at least more refined than the previous one.
This lesson, in theory, could also apply to our personal lives, but in practice I haven't seen this happening. There, it is just failure over failure and we don't seem to learn anything from our previous mistakes. Like the dog returns to the vomit and the fool's bandaged finger returns to the fire, we always tend to repeat the same errors one way or another. I believe this is because our our broken, sinful, human nature. “From the crooked timber of humanity, nothing straight can be made". I think this one was by Immanuel Kant. Can you change human nature? No, you Kant. (Sorry for the bad pun).
And of course, in social and political issues, since we are dealing with a collective of crooked humans, the exact thing happens — mistakes are made and repeated over and over and no one learns anything from them. Things change, but we don't see much general improvement, except perhaps for brief times and in very specific periods. That's why I think the “progressive” view that sees society as perpetually evolving towards some utopian social ideal is incorrect and stupid. There will never be an “utopia” on Earth. However, the “conservative” view is also wrong, as there is no “utopia” back in the past either. The best we can hope for is some sort of resignation to our imperfect natures and making the best out of it.
But I digressed and forgot what was the point I was trying to make. I think, mostly, that you can improve your artistic skills with constant practice, but the same is not completely true in “real life". Although, even there, some small improvement may be possible.
Ah, no, there was something else: what I mentioned about painting is valid mostly for realistic painting, where you are trying to copy a model or a reference, although I suppose it could apply to modern abstract painting as well. By the way, I don't think “realism", whatever that is, is the main quality of a work of art or even a good objective to have.
Sometimes I hear people say, “wow, what an amazing painting, it looks like a photograph". That is the mark of a philistine or an idiot. As if an accurate representation of another two-dimensional illusion was what art was all about. Most of the modern hyperrealistic paintings, by the way, are really boring, reproducing random prosaic objects or human models in extremely uninteresting poses.
The great Renaissance masters such as Leonardo, Raphael and Botticelli were not “realists”. Their paintings certainly do not look like photographs. But even the later masters of the Baroque, such as Velázquez and Caravaggio, who were the closest you may get to a “realistic” representation of human figures, are not realistic — if you look closely into their paintings, you will see that some details are done just with a couple of brushstrokes. Painting is all about illusion, not reality.
Okay, let us finish this absurdist soliloquy with another quote, this one by Kierkegaard, illustrating the difference between how people see us and how we see ourselves. Thanks for reading, and see you around.
That Kierkegaard quote made me laugh out loud. Thanks!