Create poorly

There’s a new coffee shop in Brooklyn called Still Life. They call themselves an Art Space and Coffee House, and despite the fact that I have no business being anywhere near an “art space,” I find myself at Still Life often. It’s airy and open, with amazing chai lattes and a soothing aesthetic. Aside from a tranquil workspace, they offer art classes, community events, and materials gathered beautifully across tables for anyone to use—sketch pencils, paper, and different artistic tools that I don’t even know the proper names for.

It’s a place to work, but it’s really a place for artists to create art—which is why I was always intimidated by spending more than a few minutes inside. But recently when I passed by, and I was beckoned in by a warm glow in the frigid winter gloom, I sat at one of the tables and plucked a sharp pencil from the jar in front of me.

Not long ago, I’d brought my three boys here so they could draw while snacking on banana bread, then leave their art for the enormous, and growing, gallery inside. Without my children—the real artists, in my mind—present, I hesitated. But after determining that no one was watching me, no one was going to throw me out for being untalented, and literally nobody cared what I was doing, I began sketching the flowers in front of me, which were begging to be immortalized visually on the page.

I’ve been drawing every day since. Only for five or ten minutes during a break in my workday, and with whatever medium I have handy, taken from the kids’ art cart. In the hopes of fostering their creative spirits, I’ve spent years amassing a collection of artistic tools for them that range from crayons and Crayola markers, to watercolor brushes, metallic pens, and charcoal pencils that I myself have never used until now.

Upon completion, each of my drawings have been immediately destroyed, because I’m still worried someone will find them and judge me for earnestly trying at something that I am catastrophically bad at.

When it comes to drawing, I harbor no delusions—or hope—of eventual competence. But there’s something about creating art for the sake of the process, as opposed to the outcome, that is so enjoyable.

Somewhere along the way (and I believe for most of us, it was depressingly early in our lives) we absorbed the grim message that we shouldn’t do things we’re not good at. Or that if we’re going to do something at all, we should be working toward mastery: training for the marathon, angling for the gallery show, publishing the novel. Making a decent side hustle from our creative skills. Tim Wu diagnosed this affliction in his 2018 essay In Praise of Mediocrity, mourning what he called “the gentle pursuit of modest competence, the doing of something just because you enjoy it, not because you are good at it.”

The consequence of this relentless quest for excellence is that so many of us simply abstain. We default to consumption over creation. We scroll through the work of others and pronounce ourselves “not talented” or “not artistic,” as though creativity were not a deeply human impulse we’ve merely neglected into dormancy.

I wonder if this is changing, though. When I look at social media or open newsletters from my favorite bookstores and event spaces, I see more and more invitations to an array of creative gatherings, activities, sessions, classes, salons, and date night offerings. There’s everything from pottery, watercoloring, and speed drawing, to charm bracelet making, collaging, and rock painting, to dancing, group singalongs, and micropoetry writing. Most of them have wait lists longer than the attendance roster.

If I had more hours in the day, I would show up to these regularly—even the ones I’d be awful at. Especially those. And clearly I’m not alone. The sheer ubiquity of them indicates something beyond a trend. It suggests yearning.

The question is, what are we all hungry for, that we’re seeking in a Wednesday night cupcake decorating workshop?

I don’t think it’s the skill-building. Community is definitely part of it. But at the heart of it, I think it’s about the permission. It’s about being allowed to be creative, oftentimes together.

Of course, we don’t actually need the group. We can simply begin, wherever we are and whomever we’re with.

Here’s what the research keeps revealing: skill level is besides the point. A 2016 study from Drexel University measured cortisol (the stress hormone) in participants before and after forty-five minutes of making art. Seventy-five percent emerged with significantly lower levels. However, there was no correlation whatsoever between stress reduction and artistic experience. The novice who’d never so much as held a decent brush derived the same biological boost as the lifelong practitioner.

The mere act of making something, no matter how that final product might be received, engages multiple regions of the brain simultaneously, what psychologists call “flow state,” which is an immersive, time-dissolving quality that functions as a kind of mental sanctuary. It summons the parasympathetic nervous system (your body’s “rest and digest” response, a merciful counterweight to chronic vigilance), releases dopamine, and generally offers your overwrought mind something to occupy itself with besides ruminating, catastrophizing, or composing imaginary conversations.

And there’s something particularly liberating about the deliberate creation of poorly-done art. When you arrive at the page or the canvas or the art space with no expectations, the inner critic is disarmed. You cannot fail at something you were never attempting to succeed at. You’re simply making marks on paper, or mangling clay into approximate shapes, or stringing words alongside one another.

Some places to begin:

Sketch what’s in front of you

Write a rhyming poem

Pick up an instrument you don’t know how to play

Sing in your car

Make a collage from catalogs

Write a song

Finger paint

Dance in your kitchen

Build something from cardboard

Arrange flowers in a jar

Smoosh around clay

Embroider a phrase onto something

Try calligraphy with a cheap brush pen

Draw a comic strip about your week

Press flowers between book pages

Carve something from a bar of soap

Bake a loaf of no-knead bread

Knit a square

Craft a puppet from a paper bag

Bedazzle a book cover

Decorate ready-bake cookies with frosting in a can

Hand-make valentines

The purpose isn’t to cultivate a skill or build toward some shareable culmination. The purpose is to spend time making something simply because the making of it feels good, and to let that be sufficient. It’s enough to be an amateur, in the original Latin sense of the word: amare, to love. One who does something for the love of it, unburdened by the heartache of desired outcome.

We are not obligated to be good at everything we do. We’re barely obligated to be good at most things we do. Sometimes the best reason to do something is that it’s fun. The world doesn’t need to witness the result, and you’ll never achieve mastery, and you do it anyway.

The bar, as they say, is on the floor. None of us need permission to step over it.

Glimmers to share

✨The Six Bells Crimson Crossings Quilt was a gift this year, and it already feels like an heirloom.

✨Another gift, from a friend who knows where my heart is.

✨WTF notebooks: the website is such an entertaining rabbit hole and these notebooks also make fantastic presents.