The Miracle of Mediocrity

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So I came up with a simple idea: five minutes of collage at night, before we went to bed. We tore up magazines and the stock-photo catalog books Laurie uses when she does graphic design. After a few nights, Laurie began smiling. She had a nice little pile of collages. But it was still hard. Five minutes before bedtime wasn’t much, and there was always that inner perfectionist screeching, 'Make a good collage, schmuck!' Laurie began to realize that it was that voice, more than anything else, that kept any art she did, big or small, from being a joy.

Then we read Michele Cassou’s wonderful book Life, Paint, and Passion—a guide to using painting to free yourself from bad little inner voices. Are you afraid of making a bad painting? asks Cassou. Then go ahead and make one. Paint an ugly, sloppy mess, and see how you feel.

Laurie and I tried it.

We felt great.

We learned to wreck our paintings as soon as they got careful. The minute I felt that nasty stiffening of the spine that says, 'I hope this is going to be good,' I would scrawl godawful crayon marks over the whole thing. As ugliness piled on ugliness, I felt a giddy sense of transgression. I would watch Laurie fill her drawings with meaningless little dots and dashes, just to fill up space. 'I abhor a vacuum,' she said with a wanton laugh.

Soon Laurie was inviting friends. Making Bad Art a weekly social event kept us at it on a regular basis, gluing together weird little boxes, scribbling with cattle markers, sticking down collage pieces that had been ripped, not cut, out of stock books. One attender made fabulously strange little purses out of cigar boxes. Another, a professional artist who was feeling blocked, created wild multicolored, garishly patterned female torsos out of cardboard. (She’s now exhibiting regularly.)

For a while Bad Art Night got 'hot' in Laurie’s vast community of friends.

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