The art of tiny experiments

There is nothing more intoxicating to an artist than finding their next big idea. You know, the kind that makes you leap from the bathtub and shout “eureka!” or talk obsessively about it for three months.

And I get it. We instinctively chase these instances of delight because they’re exciting and feel so bold and so dizzyingly important. But for me, it’s really the tiny moments of uncertainty and experimentation that make us grow as artists.

We did not arrive where we are by accident. Everything we make or create is the accumulation of a million micro-decisions and deliberations. We are not only our latest piece, and what makes us the artists we are isn’t just the sum total of canvases leaning against your wall.

Real growth comes in the way we slowly chip away at an idea. It’s in the throwing of all our tools in our arsenal at a problem until we’re forced to try something new. It’s in the tinkering and the playing around. It’s in the joy of the work.

Mary Shelley may have gone slightly mad one stormy night and wrote a story that spawned a genre, but creativity does not always “come out of your soul like a rocket” a la Bukoswki. Sometimes it’s a quiet rumbling, a ticking sensation in the back of your mind — a series of tiny experiments.

Turning problems into puzzles

In every painting there is a problem. An aspect of what you’re recording that you’re not sure how to set onto paper. It is the artist’s duty to turn the fragmented ideas lurking at brain’s edges into something concrete and tangible, but what’s imagined doesn’t always match up to what’s made.

These challenges can enliven us or make us choke up. You can prowl around the canvas for days trying to discover a new angle or approach. You can despair or fall into inertia trying to figure out how someone else has solved it. But most of the time, the best thing you can do is to just do anything at all.

I think about my own artwork and the tiny details that trouble me. I’ve been drawing skulls and generally deathly pieces (much to the dismay of my granny) for a few years now. Lately, these skulls have moved from vanitas and martyred saints’ skeletons to skulls belonging to various animals.

In the beginning, I liked the gleaming white space of simpler skulls. It felt easy to play around with the blank space and leave the void to create structure and feeling. I see now that that was quite lazy, really, and recently I’ve been more and more drawn to skulls that have depth and texture, tricky details and sharp edges.

Progression comes slow, if at all

But in this complexity lay those problems I talked about earlier — those elements within a subject that it’s hard to even find words for, let alone a way to record on a page or in a painting.

It’s in these moments that we have to experiment. There is a desperate need to try something new because what we’ve done so far isn’t working. This means stepping out of the warmth of what’s comfortable and familiar, and maybe even making a fool of ourselves.

Maybe it works, maybe it doesn’t, but you’re the only one who will notice anyway. And somehow I’ve found that it’s in these alterations that new ideas emerge. The best ideas — the ones that unlock something loose in my mind and beget more — are the kind that come from playing around and having no expectations.

Whether it’s a colour, way of marking or adding a new material like gold leaf, each of these tiny experiments lead onto my next piece. Ideas and approaches appear when I don’t even really think about it, where I say “maybe this will work” or I just scratch my pen on the page in a different way to see what happens.

A crocodile skull that took me more than a few nights to capture the tiny details of

Happy accidents

Then, there are always those moments while creating that all seems lost, or you feel certain that whatever you just did has definitely just ruined everything. But suddenly and so often these mistakes or accidental markings become something more.

That idea I wasn’t so sure of or thought would look silly seem to add a weight and feeling I couldn’t have intended. And then once the work is done, I look back and find that that accident has become my favourite part. It’s a mistake I want to make over and over.

Your signature style won’t happen overnight. What will make your work irrevocably and immutably your own doesn’t always appear like a flash of inspiration. Gustav Klimt didn’t begin with the Kiss. Egon Schiele’s unsettlingly warped bodies didn’t start off that way.

They trialled and tested and followed their ideas through. They made mistakes. They gathered lessons and insights, allowing each idea to lead them to the next. Their tiny experiments coalesced into some larger, unforeseeable whole.

So, step back. You don’t want this all at once. Knowing it all wouldn’t be any fun anyway. Let it unfurl knowing that when the independent pieces come together in their final form, they will have sense and semblance and appear like they’re supposed to.

Don’t let yourself get lost in the weeds. Give yourself space to explore and experiment without getting too wrapped up in the final product. But if you’re unsure, pin these immortal words by Virginia Woolf on your easel or on the wall:

“The great relation perhaps never did come. Instead, there were little daily miracles, illuminations, matches struck unexpectedly in the dark.”

If you’d like to see more of my art, you can also find me on Instagram and Etsy.

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How to stay in love with your creative practice