Trusting The Creative Process : Why I Burn Art

To grow as a creative of any sort, you have to try ideas that might not work, make mistakes, and push beyond the boundaries of what you already know. Otherwise, you risk caging yourself in a comfort zone of complacentcy.

Any creative who is making their work, knows what happens to their creativity when they get stuck in the dreaded "comfort zone". The art stops flowing, you feel blocked and in order to break free, you must force yourself to grow beyond where you currently are.

You have to begin again anew, into the unknown, so you can reach the next level.

I make a LOT of art. I mean loads of the stuff, making art for me is therapeutic. It helps me process and explore the depth of my thoughts, emotions, and ideas. I also use it as a fun way to learn entire new subjects. I will deeply research ideas, listen to audio books, explore things I am curious about, while drawing them out in symbolic, novel way. The novelty of making art, which I find fun, has always been a brain hack for better retaining and relating to information in a way I enjoy. My art studio is where I go daily to make my artwork, but it is also where I go to feel, think, and explore.

I don't wait for perfect ideas or perfect results and make work. Instead I sit down, and explore iterations on an idea in different ways—including the awkward half finished attempts and unsuccessful ones—is how I am able to find out what is possible.

For that reason my annual ritual art burning has become a part of my artistic process. 

Bad art is part of the process. Not every painting I make works.

I sit down to create daily, and some days I am not feeling inspired. Although I love making art, some days still feel like work, but I don't wait around for inspiration because I know that inspiration lightning bolt moments often find me while I am doing the work. Action gets results, and so I push through and create anyway.

Some pieces of art are stepping stones to better pieces that lead me somewhere I would not have found if I had not been willing to attempt something new, and get it wrong first. (more on that later, I will share an example, stay with me here)

The finished painting is not the only valuable result. Making art is a practice where one gains, insight, growth, and emotional release, even when the art itself fails.

Sometimes I make a painting because I need to understand what I am feeling. That process helps me work through grief, frustration, anger, confusion, or uncertainty, even if it never becomes a "successful finished work".

Treting every finished object as precious because each one represents time, materials, attention, and emotion is a trap. I don't like to fall for this trap, because trust me it is one that leads one to perfectionism, resentment, or artist block. Once a painting exists, it can be difficult to admit that it is not working, you can hit a point of sunk cost fallacy, and that trap becomes another form of fear. If I am too afraid to ruin a canvas, I may stop taking risks on the next one. I may ruin the freedom and joy I have around making art. 

Why I Burn The Bad Art

Sometimes, I burn art. I know that it bothers people. Destroying a painting can seem extreme, wasteful or dramatic. Why spend hours making something only to set it on fire? For me, burning a painting does not erase the time I spent on it. The painting has already given me something valuable. It helped me practice, test an idea, identify a problem, or process emotions. Once it has done that, I may not need to keep it or even finish it. Burning represents an intentional clean break.

Failed paintings can take up a lot of mental space. They sit in a stack in the studio, reminding me of unfinished ideas or disappointing results. I may keep wasting my time trying to rescue it because I feel obligated to see the idea through, even when I know it is no longer useful.  Destroying it is my way of saying: this experiment is over. I obtained from it what I needed and I am ready to move on.

Burning artwork should always be done with intention, so I try to plan it on a waning crescent moon if it's not too windy. Waning crescents are the perfect time for release and letting go.

Many Artists Have Destroyed Their Own Work Thoughout History

Artists have long destroyed, discarded, painted over, or withheld work in order to move forward.

Georgia O’Keeffe destroyed paintings she considered unsuccessful. She was highly self-critical and willing to keep work from being shown if it no longer represented her.

Claude Monet destroyed or discarded paintings that did not meet his standards. He damaged or abandoned canvases when they failed to achieve the effect he wanted. Rejecting a painting did not mean he lacked confidence. It meant he was willing to remove work that did not meet his goals.

Pablo Picasso repeatedly reworked and painted over earlier compositions. His process was not a straight line from blank canvas to finished masterpiece. He changed figures, relationships, and entire images. For Picasso, painting was a place to investigate.

Francis Bacon destroyed many paintings he felt had failed. Some were cut up or made impossible to exhibit. His process showed that a painting can be technically strong and still fail to communicate what the artist intended.

Many other artists have burned sketches, torn up drawings, scraped down canvases, or discarded studies. The reasons vary, but the principle is similar: Growth and creativity requires removing what is holding you back. Being a great artist, means being critical of your own output, and holding yourself up to an evolving expectation that each piece you create furthers your vision of what you intend for you work.

Now, now, now...these examples should not be romanticized. Destroying work is not automatically a sign of artistic seriousness, and keeping a painting is not a sign of fear. Artists can destroy work for many reasons, including frustration, perfectionism, privacy, limited space, emotional release, or the need to start again. These are all valid reasons.  The lesson here is not that great artists destroyed their work, so everyone should join in and do the same. The lesson is that artists should honor their artistic process, in whatever ways they find works for them. There shouldn't be any pressure to preserve, commodify and profit off of everything single thing you output. 

Keeping or selling everything can also make it harder to see what work is strongest. It can also keep you tied to old works that no longer reflects your skills or goals.

The same idea applies in the studio. An artistic practice is larger than the work you show. It includes failed experiments, abandoned ideas, technical exercises, and paintings that taught you something but do not need to be preserved or displayed.

The goal is not to wait for every idea to be brilliant. It is to keep making, iterating, testing, and moving forward. Some attempts will be strong. Some will be weak. Some will be outright embarrassing. That is part of engaging in a daily active creative process.

Permission to Make the Wrong Thing

The fear of making bad art can become a fear of making anything unfamiliar.

You choose subjects you already know how to paint. You repeat compositions that have worked before. You avoid materials that might behave unpredictably. You stop when the painting becomes difficult.

Eventually, the work may look competent but no longer feel alive.

Experimentation requires being willing to be temporarily bad at something. You have to make the wrong mark, choose the wrong color, lose the drawing, overwork the surface, or take an idea farther than you know how to control. That does not mean every mistake is worth keeping but it does mean making mistakes has to be allowed.

You also need enough iterations to understand an idea. One drawing or painting is rarely enough. You may need to make a few versions, maybe ten, or maybe more. I find doing something multiple times, and allowing some to fail completely means the others may reveal a detail, gesture, color, or structure that becomes crucial.

The goal is not to make bad art. The goal is to create an environment where bad art is possible—and where unexpected, stronger work can emerge.

Failure Is Part of the Practice

I burn paintings because a particular painting has already given me what I needed and it is cathartic to acknowledge that and let the painting go.

Destruction is not in opposition to creating. Rather it is a cycle, an oroboros of sorts and it helps me maintain a healthy creative practice.

I never want to become so afraid of ruining a canvas that I stop taking risks on the next one. The artwork I destroy is proof that I was willing to experiment, push boundaries, iterate, and keep making. That being said. People see the finished pieces that I share and offer up for sale. Those paintings, are the result of many experimentations, iterations, and mistakes that paved the way as practice for the finished piece.

I have included a few photos below for those of you who stuck around this long, or were curious enough to scroll to the bottom. 

After looking at the photos below. I invite you to click on the links at the bottom to see the two finished pieces that resulted from the process of letting that particular one one go.  I'm hoping by sharing, you can see how my crazy art burning process leads me towards making my much stronger finished work.

I reuse matierials when I can. Stretcher bars get reused to stretch fresh canvas on. I cut the canvas off the stretchers and roll them. When the stack of canvases that aren't working gets too big, and something is no longer worth saving, out comes the box cutter and I cull pieces that will later get burned. This is so super cathartic when I feel stuck, frustrated with my output or over burdened by the backlog of unfinished pieces that I have no interest in trying to solve. I know to some of you that might seem crazy or extreme. That's ok. It probably is crazy, but I have found this personally works for me.

The next two photos below are of me working on a piece that didn't work out, which was abandoned and burned. These photos, taken in 2022, were an exploration of loss, grief, death, aging and impermanance. That piece was set aside and eventually burned, but it became a stepping stone, that led me on my way to seperating the idea into two distinct pieces of artwork, one that focused on impermanence/death/aging as it relates to cycles of death and rebirth seen in nature. Later I went back to more personal spiritual experiences of loss, grief, visitation, transformation, and symbolic syncronicities in another work a year later. 

This piece wasn't hitting the mark for me. It wasn't acheiving the depth of emotions, I was trying to convey. but it helped me literally sit with my feelings and then later, letting go by burning it. After burning it, I started anew, which led to creating : Impermanence  and then a year later I decided to reapproach the cardinal symbolism and the emotions still hanging on that Impermanence missed, which led to Siubhail: Ancestors Draw Close.

Hopefully looking at those two links, you can see how letting the piece above be abandoned and then burned, gave me freedom to creatively push through, further exploring, those emotions and concepts, creating artwork that better captures and conveys the narritive.