Start Ugly + Start Often
EPISODE 035: START UGLY + START OFTEN
Standing in front of Michelangelo’s David in Florence it’s hard not to be impressed, and easy to forget that masterpiece was once just a (very large) twice-abandoned chunk of dirty marble that no one seemed to want, or that Michelangelo himself was once a scrappy apprentice without the skill to find David in the marble. But they both became so much more. Let’s talk about it.
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FULL TRANSCRIPT
In his lifetime Salvador Dali, the great Catalan surrealist painter, perhaps best known for The Persistence of Memory, and melted clocks, created over 1500 paintings. That’s in addition to his work in other media, including sculptures and book illustrations, theatre set design, and drawings. Picasso, himself no slouch, called him “an outboard motor that’s always running.”
It’s no surprise, then, that Dali is quoted as saying that “no masterpiece has ever come from a lazy artist.” You don’t get that much work done by sitting around hoping to find your groove or waiting for inspiration. You get it done by starting. By doing. And the astonishing thing is that the more you do, the better it becomes, the more it gets mistaken for having been inspired. That one reality is also very comforting and it’s what keeps me going some days. Our job is not to make masterpieces in whatever discipline we pursue, but to do the work that will one day bring us closer to mastery. By definition, only masters create masterpieces.
In addition to being so prolific, Dali is known for being extremely innovative. Is that even the right word for what he did? I mean, Dali was beyond original or authentic–though he was those too–he was just way out in the middle of his own thing. Does it surprise you to hear that he once said, “Those who do not want to imitate anything, produce nothing”? I think he was pointing to one of the things that paralyzes any of us in our desire to make, or create, whatever art is ours: the desire to be original. Far from being a catalyst for great work it can be the reason for no work at all.
I’m David duChemin and this is episode 35 of A Beautiful Anarchy, my mostly weekly podcast about the creative life and the joys and obstacles we experience while living it. What’s Dali got to do with that? Let’s talk about it.
Intro/Music
In Episode 33 of A Beautiful Anarchy I discussed another prolific creator, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, and if you missed that episode I urge you to go back and listen to it. Goethe might just be one of our best guides to beginning and to getting shit done. I don’t want to cover that ground again, but I do want to take another look at the idea of starting from another angle, not only because my new book Start Ugly is now out and I would be very pleased to know you’re reading it and it’s helping you take whatever next steps are needed in your creative life right now, and not only as a way to remind you that it can be found in PDF, Kindle, and printed editions at StartUglyBook.com, but because book or no book, Starting is one of the hardest hurdles we face in art-making or the making of anything, no matter what you call it, and I want to give you 3 really good reasons to begin whatever it is you do more often and sooner and to let those starts be as ugly as they need to be.
One of the enduring stories from my childhood was Hans Christian Anderson’s Ugly Duckling. A mother duck hatches a brood of eggs, only discover that one of them is much uglier than the others, a duckling so ugly it is teased and ostracized and eventually runs away. He finds a home with wild ducks and geese until, in true Hans Christian Anderson tradition, it goes horrible awry and those wild birds get slaughtered by hunters. Cheerful guy, that Mr. Anderson. The duckling then finds shelter with an old woman who’s cat and hen tease the ugly little bird, revealing the first moral of the story, presumably that animals can be assholes too. Eventually the duckling spends a winter on his own, emerging in the spring to join a group of swans who, for the first time, do not recoil at his ugly mug but accept him as though they had no reason to do otherwise, which upon seeing his reflection in the water, the presumed-duckling, now a beautiful swan, learns is exactly the case.
There are lessons aplenty in that story, not the least of which is that we judge things to be ugly only by whether they meet or fall short of our expectations. Expect a swan to look like a duck, and it’s not going to be pretty. I think the other lesson, at least the one I took from the story as a kid was that what something is in the beginning does not determine what it is in the end. Anderson seems to be telling us that there’s potential in Ugly, and that’s the first reason I think we need to embrace starting ugly and embrace it as often as possible: it is the recognizing, collecting, and nurturing of possibilities, and anyone who has spent any time in creative work knows that possibilities are everything. The more we start things with initially tentative and ugly steps and phases, the more we learn to see past the duckling, and see the potential. The more comfortable we become with ugly because ugly is needed. Ugly is potential. Ugly gets us comfortable in our own skin and makes us suspicious of the perfect, and closer to the process of refining and more quickly realizing that once-hidden potential.
The second reason I think we need to start ugly and start often is that the more apparently-ugly things we begin and refine, the more we refine our skills and our ability to think creatively, look obliquely at problems, and step closer, slowly, day by day, to mastery. Creative people, especially those who identify with the idea of making art, with a capital A, tend to focus on quality over quantity, and it’s hard to argue with a desire for excellence. But like so much in life it’s not one or the other. In fact one seems to be the path to the other, if we’re open to it.
In the very excellent book Art & Fear by Ted Orland and David Bayle, the story is told of a pottery teacher who one year splits her class in two. Half of the students are told that their final grade will be determined by how many pieces they make over the year. The other half is told they’ll be graded on one final piece submitted before the year is over. At the end of the year it was the students who had created the most work who also created the best work. The lesson seems very clear to me: we learn the skills of craft and art and creative thinking only by doing, and that doing always begins rough, unrefined, and ugly. But it’s only in making a good many ugly things that gives us the skills to later make more beautiful and refined things. If we fear ugly starts we start less often and lean toward the easy stuff, the stuff we’re already comfortable with, and that only sabotages progress and the learning that leads to the eventual mastery of technique and tool that alone can lead to masterpieces. Unlike the duckling we do not grow into a swan merely by waiting out the ugly phase, but by embracing it and learning everything we can from it, and by doing the work. Lots of work.
Finally, the more things you begin and refine, the more you will recognize your own way of doing things. Your own rhythms. Your own rituals. Your own demons and haunting voices. And the more you understand what works for you and what doesn’t, the sooner you can get to flow, which is where the refinement of ugly takes place and things begin to find their best expression and you find your way out of the rut and into the groove.
That’s where we’re all trying to get to. To flow. To the groove. To that place where the ugly first efforts are behind us and we’re seeing the angel emerge from the block of stone the way Michelangelo did as he carved. But remember, he too had his ugly beginnings. When he carved his own masterpiece, David, he started with a dirty, twice-rejected block of marble from Carrara in Tuscany, Italy.
I spent an afternoon in Carrara 9 years ago. That same day ended for me in an Italian hospital with shattered feet being told I’d never walk the same way again. The doctor told me I’d always walk with a limp but because I would forever be limping with both feet it wouldn’t look like a limp. He did not elaborate or tell me what it would look like, and to this day I wonder what that meant. Was it a riddle, a zen koan to be meditated on? Would I saunter? Sachay? Swagger, perhaps? We’re getting off the point here, but before my gait was so permanently transformed later that night in Pisa, I wandered around the quarries, basically trespassing except the man that brought me there was a cop so there was a certain amount of legitimacy, however imagined, to our presence. And I can tell you I saw no trace of Michelangelo’s angel. Or David. Just big chunks of unremarkable white rock, rough and dirty.
It must take a hell of a lot of vision to see the angel in the marble. But also a willingness to start ugly and to allow that process to remain ugly for a while. It took Michelangelo more than two years to finish David. But what is so seldom told is how David started, almost 50 years before, with it’s commission given to another artist, Agostino di Duccio, who roughed things out, on and off, for a couple years before he just gave up. The marble was then given to Antonio Rossellino who was fired shortly thereafter for reasons now lost to time. And then the roughed out marble sat for 26 years, neglected in the yard of the cathedral workshop in Florence until Michelangelo beat out Leonardo da Vinci for the honour of completing it, which he did in 1504.
David now stands, astonishingly beautiful, in the Galleria dell’Accademia in Florence where thousands of visitors a day either giggle at his tiny man-parts or gape at him in awe or wonder, depending on their age. It is almost impossible to imagine him now as just a large block of dirty stone much bigger than his finished 6-tonnes, but his start - and even much of the process to create the wonder he became, was as ugly as anything you or I will ever put our hand to.
Returning somewhat belatedly to my point, Michelangelo started ugly just like we do. And not just in making David or the Sistine Chapel, but in becoming Michelangelo. He learned his craft as we do. Earlier efforts gave way to growing mastery, and eventually to the extraordinary skill and artistry he became known for. If anyone has ever found his groove, it was him. But despite his reputation for natural genius, he still maintained: “If people knew how hard I worked to get my mastery, it wouldn’t seem so wonderful at all.” He also said, “there is no greater harm than that of time wasted,” so I’m guessing he would be on board with Goethe’s encouragement to get going on things now and not later.
That’s also where Michelangelo is joined by Dali. The idea that mastery is achieved by hard work. It does not present itself either in the art or the artist who makes it, as though it were spoken into existence and arrived polished and complete. No painting was ever created without first being a canvas of tremendous potential for either great beauty or astonishing mediocrity. The same is true of every book or sculpture, every movie, song, or business idea. True, they finish differently, and there’s probably a lifetime of conversations to be had about how we navigate the messy middle of a project or the decision to call it done and sign our names to it. But you won’t get to that point if you don’t start ugly and often, and do the hard work to learn not only your craft, but your craft done your way, to discover your own voice, your own process and rhythms, and your own reliable path to getting to flow.
It’s been said by voices with more credibility and experience than mine, but I’ll echo it: creativity is not a talent, it is a work ethic. That will either scare you away or give you hope. I’m among those to whom it gives hope. It means my work is not up to the muses or to my DNA about which I can do nothing. It’s not a kind of magic to which I need to find a secret key. It’s a result of starting ugly, and starting often, and seeing where those starts take me, learning from them, and getting ever closer to not only the best work of my life, but to becoming the worker that will create it. Want to get out of your rut and into your groove? Do more work. Do work that challenges you. Usually that’s the stuff that starts even uglier than what you’ve been doing. Be suspicious of the work that starts easy. Sometimes it does and that’s a gift, but most of the time the easy stuff is only easy because you’ve done it before.
The longer I do this the more I’m sure that Hans Christian Anderson was on to something. The more sure I am that he wasn’t really talking about ducks and swans and that there’s something incredible about the potential of the creative process to transform dubious, unattractive, hesitant starts into something so much bigger. And the more protective I become of anything that helps me start my work, ugly or otherwise, as often as possible. The more I start, the more opportunities I have to experience that transformation. It’s made me take ideas like flow more seriously, because there are things you can do to get there more reliably. I’ve become more protective of the habit and ritual that help make those starts automatic and less an option to me. And I’ve stopped listening to the voices that once discouraged my creative efforts and thinking by pointing out how ugly, unrefined, speculative or half-baked they are. The voices are still there. They still natter at me and point out the ugly. But now I nod my head and smile, knowing the voices are right. Those initial beginnings are always ugly, but it’s only as I keep working that they get less so and the angel begins to appear, ever so slowly, from the ugly rock from which it’s hewn.
Want to explore the idea of starting ugly and starting often as the unexpected path to everyday creativity? Love this podcast and want to support it, or be able to curl up with these ideas without having to spend more time online with a device? Both my new books, Start Ugly and The Problem with Muses are available now in PDF, Kindle, or paperback editions at StartUglyBook.com or in the case of Kindle or the paperback, directly from Amazon and I would be so grateful if you’d consider adding them to your collection of resources in which you find inspiration and light for your creative life, and sharing them with those with whom you live, work, and create. As always, thank you for the incredible privilege of being part of your creative journey. If there’s something about that journey you’d like to share with me you can always reach out by email. You can get me at talkback@abeautifulanarchy.com. We’ll talk again soon, until then, go make something beautiful.
Music in this episode: Acid Jazz (Kevin Macleod) / CC BY-SA 3.0