Loosen Up That Need for Control! Creative Accidents Are Your Friends

Do yourself a favor, and welcome the unexpected gift of "imperfect" surprise

Self-portrait, 1973, by Aimee Liu.

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Hi Everyone,

As requested, here’s your mid-week break for “Visual or poetic inspiration.” I hope this resonates!

Aimee

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Learning to Let Go

Long ago, when I was a painting major in college, I found that my best work was blessed by accident. A line would wobble. I’d use the wrong color. I’d rub up against the canvas. The undercoat of gesso would go on rough, causing colors on top to catch and build in unexpected textures. I’d paint what I saw — the surface of an enamel sugar bowl — and discover myself in its reflection. Unhappiness, too, produced useful effects, and if not accidental, this certainly was unintended.

In art and in life, it’s the unexpected associations that often lead to the deepest discoveries.

I was anorexic then, silently flailing against family and dependence and my own inert terror of stepping out into the life I yearned for. I spent the summer of my sophomore year in New Haven almost entirely alone, matting prints and drawings in the Yale Art Gallery by day and painting by myself in the studio most evenings. I produced countless self portraits, a memorable bowl of oranges (my primary sustenance), and a haunting angled and empty picture, which I still have, of the studio with a mirror and my reflection.

Nothing in these paintings was planned, except for the most rudimentary architecture and sense of subject. Usually, I couldn’t tell whether the paintings were even worth keeping until I’d left the studio and returned the next day, or faced the canvasses against the wall before revisiting them a few weeks later.

Brush Painting by Aimee Liu, 1972

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In another painting I’ve kept through the decades, the brush marks of the sizing I used to prime the board come through the paint. It’s a picture of brushes in a glass jar, white rings to suggest the lip of the jar. Deep cuts of alizarin crimson sharpen the outlines of bristles, and blurred strokes convey the jumble of handles behind glass. But it’s the accidental effect of that undercoat that somehow makes the effect of glass most real. The painting is flawed in other ways — the planes of table and wall, the hanging rag behind the brushes don’t work at all — but the sense of glass and shine and bristle and mass, the wonder of accident remains a lesson.