Importance of Bad Painting

August 2, 2025

You have to make a lot of bad paintings to get to the good ones. That’s just the truth of it. Not the romanticized version of the artist who arrives fully formed, spilling genius onto every canvas, but the real version, the version you’re living. The one where the paint doesn’t always do what you want it to, where your ideas get lost somewhere between your mind and your hand, where you finish a piece and wonder if you’ve actually regressed. It can be frustrating. Disheartening, even. But those bad paintings? They’re not a waste. They’re necessary. Without them, the work you dream of making won’t come.

You learn by doing, and sometimes that means doing it badly, many times, over and over. You find your voice by hearing what it isn’t first. You learn what doesn’t work, what feels false, what feels forced. You make a mess and then realize, in the middle of it, that something about the composition is actually interesting. Or you overwork a canvas and only then understand where you should have stopped. Each mistake teaches something you couldn’t have learned any other way. No book, no tutorial, no teacher can substitute for the lessons hidden in your own process. The only way forward is through the work, especially the work that doesn’t turn out the way you hoped.

You might be tempted to dismiss those paintings, to bury them, to only show the ones that look polished. But try to see them for what they are: stepping stones. They are how you get to the pieces that do shine. The masterpieces don’t happen in a vacuum. They grow out of the compost of failed attempts, of false starts, of days when you kept going even when it felt like nothing was working. The good paintings rely on the bad ones. They are connected. Always.

So don’t disregard them. Don’t be ashamed of them. Be grateful for them. They are part of the path, and the more of them you make, the clearer that path becomes. Keep painting. Keep failing. Keep learning. Because every canvas you struggle through is moving you closer to something true, something real, something only you can create. It takes the bad to get to the good. That’s not a flaw in the process, it is the process.