How Trashing Your Work Can Actually Improve It

Has anyone ever taken a shit on a cake you’d just baked? Like, after you pulled it out of the oven but before you’d done the icing?

Probably not. I know that’s not very common. What about this: Do you ever feel like the people you love don’t understand, let alone respect, what you do? Do you think they’d treat your work like a literal trash can if they could?

I like to think that I’ve sacrificed quite a bit for my family. “I could be in New York City,” I sometimes think to myself, “living in a tiny apartment and riding the subway to a cutting-edge design agency every morning.” The truth is, I don’t know if I could actually cut it on the cutting edge. But it doesn’t really matter, because I live upstate with my eight-year-old and his dad, whose job dictates our living arrangements. These two people are probably responsible for 99.6% of all the happiness I’ve ever received from humans. And I’ve met a lot of amazing people, I have really great friends, and in general have had a lot of happy encounters. So even though I’ll have the odd “What if my career wasn’t impeded by my family” thought, deep down I always know that I’m better off because I have my family.

I started this painting around four months ago. I made the first brush strokes in a rush of confidence, my mind already skipping ahead to the painting I’d do after this one. It’s a watercolor, so it should have taken me no more than a couple of weeks to put it to bed. It’s been strapped to my drafting table like a torture victim ever since, suffering the prying gawps of house guests and gazing longingly up at starry skies through the window whose blinds I never close. Occasionally I’ll sit at the painting’s side and gently brush the dust away, psychically promising to set it free soon. “I just need to balance out the values,” I’ll decide. Or “Just about the only thing left is to add a bit of this color.”

But after a couple of months I began to feel a bit like Dr. Frankenstein, shoving rotting old ideas into a monstrosity that I just kept hoping would come to life.

“Cool!” Studio interlopers will sometimes comment, uninvited. They typically hold their hands behind their backs, an exaggerated nonverbal communication of their respect of my sacred space. In fairness, my studio doesn’t have a door. It’s part of an open-concept section of my house and could easily be mistaken as an extension of our dining room. “You’re talented!” They can’t hear the painting screaming in agony, “Liaaaar!”

As annoying as I find this polite behavior, it is nothing compared to the rage I felt the day I stepped into my studio and saw the crumpled candy wrapper placed directly atop my metaphorical cake. Yes, I had done the initial bake nearly four months ago, but I had all these ambitious plans for intricate decorations, and I was just waiting until I was totally ready and the moment was truly right to finish it up!

“WHY am I so STUPID that I think I can have a career and a family at the same time?!” I fumed, stalking over to the drafting table. I was going to make my kid pick up every piece of trash in the neighborhood, just to teach him how to use a trash can.

I probably tilted my head and narrowed my eyes. Why was the wrapper placed just so, directly in the center and alongside the swatch of darker blue running diagonally through the rectangular sheet of paper? In addition to there being a generous amount of surface area outside of the painting, yet still on the table, there were incalculable alternative ways this trash could have been discarded upon my painting. I’d spent so long staring at this muddy blue rectangle that the stroke of red slashed across its surface was as shocking as it was infuriating.

I snapped this photo to add to my collection of household grievances that I keep on my phone. Then I discarded the candy wrapper and went about my day, which, as usual, was chock-full of tasks that had nothing to do with painting.

Over the next few weeks, though, I kept returning to that photo on my phone, where it rests among empty soda cans and dirty socks strewn about the floor of my home. I tried very hard to remember my original vision for this work. I think I was trying to make a statement about the intrinsic connection between humanity and the universe. When a human is emotionally damaged the universe is metaphysically damaged…that sort of thing. What I’d been struggling with was how to turn the appearance of “the universe” into a surface that was believably woundable. Staring at this photo, I couldn’t shake the feeling that the Skittles wrapper had wounded the painting in a way I never could.

After this, the tone of the painting was forever changed for me. Although I expected to hear it lamenting the humiliation of being treated like a waste receptacle, instead it seemed to take itself less seriously. “I guess we’re all trash in the end,” it seemed to muse with a wry chuckle. “I’m a piece of paper with some pigment. Why don’t you just finish me?”

And that’s exactly what I did.

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