Imagination

In Praise of Making Bad Art

Somewhere around age ten, most of us decide we're 'not creative' and stop making things. The cure is permission to be gloriously, freely bad at it.

5 min readPlanetEye Designs

Somewhere around age ten, most of us decide we're 'not creative' and stop making things. The cure is permission to be gloriously, freely bad at it.

We were all artists once

Watch a five-year-old make things and you'll see creativity in its natural state: constant, fearless, completely unbothered by quality. They draw purple dogs and sing nonsense operas and build cities out of cushions, and it never once occurs to them to ask whether they're any good. They make for the pure joy of making. Then, somewhere around age ten, a switch flips — they learn to compare their drawing to the kid's next to them, to notice it doesn't look 'right,' and a huge number of them quietly conclude they're 'not creative' and stop.

That conclusion is almost always false, and it's one of the saddest small tragedies of growing up. You didn't lose your creativity. You lost your tolerance for being bad at something in public — which is a completely different thing, and a fixable one. The 'I'm not creative' belief isn't a fact about your wiring. It's a scar from the moment you started judging the output instead of enjoying the act.

Every child is an artist. The problem is how to remain an artist once we grow up.

— Pablo Picasso

Comic Book Pop Art Pink Flower — Bold, joyful, unembarrassed — the spirit worth getting back.

The point is the making

Here's the reframe that gives it back to you: the value of making things was never only in the quality of what you made. It's in the act itself — the absorption, the play, the small alive feeling of bringing something into existence that wasn't there before. A bad painting made joyfully on a Sunday afternoon does almost everything a good one does for the person making it. The output is for the world, maybe; the act is for you.

Once you separate those two, the pressure lifts. You're allowed to write the bad poem, sing badly in the kitchen, doodle in the margins, make the wonky pot — not as a step toward being good, but as a complete and worthwhile thing in itself. Adults are starved of unstructured play, and making bad art is one of the purest forms of it still available to us, if we'll only give ourselves the permission we hand children without a second thought.

Bad is also the only road to good

And if you do want to get good, the path runs directly through bad anyway. Everyone's first hundred attempts at anything are rough; that's not a detour, it's the route. The writer Ira Glass described the gap every beginner feels — your taste is good enough to see that your early work is bad, and the only way to close the gap is to make a large volume of work and push through the disappointing stretch. The people who get good are simply the ones who kept making bad things long enough to start making good ones.

Which means there's no version of this where you skip the bad part. The choice isn't between bad art and good art. It's between bad art and no art — between making clumsy things now or making nothing while you wait for a competence that only comes from making clumsy things. Put that way, the answer is obvious.

Have the courage to be a beginner.

— a maker's encouragement

Abstract Guitarist Silhouette Collage Art — The only requirement is to begin, badly, today.

Go make something bad

So here is the assignment, and it's a serious one disguised as a joke: go make something bad this week. Deliberately, joyfully bad. Draw the ugly drawing, write the clumsy song, cook the experimental disaster. Lower the bar until it's lying on the floor and step right over it. You are not auditioning. No one is grading you. The only goal is to make the thing and feel, even faintly, the alive feeling you had at five.

You are not bad at art. You are just out of practice at not caring. Make something bad, and keep making them, and you'll get both things back — the skill, eventually, and the joy, immediately.

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