Happy Accidents

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 I have recently begun to view Bob Ross's The Joy of Painting videos again before drifting off to sleep.  They remain wonderful night time stories. Ross's voice is delightfully calming, even when he discovers a new idea for a painting: "Oh, wait, yes, I see it. You saw it too. A little hollow here with a cluster of trees!" Hardly worthy of an exclamation point, the intonation is so restful. But what I have rediscovered and found particularly interesting here in the days of the pandemic is his idea of "happy accidents." 

Whenever a painting begins to slip a little sideways, as close as Ross comes to "Drat" is something like "Oh, wait. Let's not make that a cloud. Let's make it a tree, and put another one here next to it. Trees need to have a friend too. See? Doesn't that look nice? We don't have mistakes here. We have happy accidents."  The notion come especially clear to me the other day. 

Smitty had been watching me sitting on the couch doing some drawing, and came over and gave me a little sketch on a half sheet of paper. "There you are!" he said. And there I was, couch, drawing glasses, pencil. Very cool.  It came out that back somewhere in his 91 years he had done, and enjoyed, drawing.  We decided to do a quick in-and-out at the local Michaels to grab a couple of sketch pads and some drawing pencils.  

We came back and did some doodling. He did a neat cat cartoon - sort of along the lines of "Kilroy Was Here!" But then he fell into the "realism trap." He tried to do sketches of things around him - Vito, the black lab, hard to even photograph, let alone draw and a couple of things on the coffee table. "Those are terrible." he declared. "I'm a failure!"

A creativity mantra I repeated and repeated during my 40+ years in the classroom was "Never compare your work to geniuses!" So we can't sing like Pavarotti or Streisand, can't paint like Wyeth, sculpt like Camille Claudel. Big deal. Neither can most of humanity. Back to Bob Ross - "The only important thing about painting is that it makes you happy."

I thought I'd share a "happy accident" with you. Over the holidays I acquired - self-gifted and received - a couple of marker sets. You can never have too many markers. Both sets were water soluble, so I decided to experiment with how they might blend together.  That resulted in this "happy accident:" 

The phrase "a face only a mother could love" springs to mind.  But the "Happy Accident" was what I learned from that particular doodle.

Even before the water drop drizzled across the drawing I learned about which markers could blend and which could not, and the "Happy Accident" of the water drop clued me in to the idea that I might be able to use a damp brush to blend some of the colors in a "serious" drawing that I wanted to spend more time with.

So, especially during the time of covid, we need to remember to cut ourselves some slack.  There are, and will continue to be a variety of events and instances where we will want to declare ourselves failures.  "I should have done that better." "Stayed more in touch with that person." "Written a poem." "Been more forgiving, more understanding." "I'm a failure."  Nonsense. We are all just ordinary people in the midst of a very trying time. If we look closely enough I think we will discover that those "failures" are often happy accidents, just waiting to teach us something delightful.

Foster Harmony. Enable Beauty. Distill Complexity. Oppose Harm.

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