Drawing the Chicken 3: Make truly terrible art

(not just because that alliterates well)

When I was doing my MFA in Creative Writing, one of my professors once brought in a big box of crayons into our writing workshop. She told us to pick one colour, open a fresh page in our composition notebooks (remember those?), and put the crayon onto the page… and then to just keep following it wherever it wanted to go. Our only rule was that we couldn’t lift the crayon off the page at all, just follow it and do whatever it did until she called time. I suppose it was a little like free writing: because you couldn’t lift the crayon off the page, you couldn’t really try to make something specific, or something pretty. The exercise was more about fully inhabiting your present moment with that crayon than it was about drawing well.

I loved it. For weeks afterwards, I crayon doodled before I wrote. Something about those colours settled my brain, something about the process grounded me and allowed me to later write from a quieter place in my head. In subsequent years, I would treat my pottery like that, my grounding place before I wrote (in those same years, I made a ritual of going straight form my pottery class to the children’s section of the public library and writing poems there. Shrug.).

Yesterday, I returned to this idea, but differently. I was overwhelmed with the book I’m writing, all its big words and heavy emotions, and I couldn't bring myself to journal (more words! more emotions!). So I pulled out a box of water colours tucked into the lowest drawer of my printer table, and I began to paint. I spent all afternoon on those watercolours, went out that evening and bought a palette, and then came back this morning and painted again. Watercolour, acrylic, oil pastels, all competing with one another for attention.

The first piece was so terrible I tore it up. The second started out well but descended into total chaos, and then I realised that my brain felt chaotic like that, especially in the context of the mountain home that made it into one corner of my painting, along with half a stick figure walking away from it. For the third, I free-doodled flowers, maybe because wildflowers are the one thing from the mountains that still feel safe, vibrant, and only beautiful. Spoiler alert: none of them are great works of art.

But that was never the point. The point was not to make “good” art— it was to make art that grounds me in a moment. I sang (“Doe a deer,” for some reason, and terribly off key at that!) as I painted. I forgot about my coffee until it was stone cold. I picked up different colours like a child playing with wet earth. I gave in to the pure pleasure of watery brush strokes on paper. And as I did, I brought myself so alive that the weight of the work I will do for the rest of the day no longer felt overpowering. That aliveness— that was the point.

It made me think about how liberating it is to go in saying I’m going to make a terrible painting today. Or write a terrible poem. Or sing terribly. But not as an act of self-depreciation, not as a way of putting down the art — no, no. I mean it simply as permission. I mean it as changing the goal posts. Because when I don’t need to do something well, I am often more able to do it fully, with abandon, and with joy. And wasn’t that the whole point of art-making?