Learning from a hopeless situation

I’m learning to paint portraits, and almost always my painting or drawing reaches a point where I recognize it as hopeless.

My first instinct is to throw it away and start over. I know there are artists who don’t use erasers. I call them “input-only”. But those artists are pros; they can afford not to remove their marks.

For someone learning, the ability to fix errors is the core of any education.

Well, sometimes my mistakes build up enough to make me feel absolutely worthless and want to quit my hobby. The work I’ve done looks absolutely hideous, even though I put in my best effort to get there.

This is the moment of truth: the education begins.

I breathe in, breathe out, and start to recover from an absolutely hopeless situation. I’m in one right now: my self-portrait went badly off.

At some point, the time to stop will come. The work will not be ideal, but it will be good enough to move to the next step.

And maybe it will have something better than cleanness: the life of a recovered thing. Not the cuteness of a Lamborghini fresh from the showroom, but the seriousness of a rally car that survived a decade of third-rate races.

Maybe that is what skill is: the depth of disaster you can recover from.