I was talking with a friend at work this week about the many crippling events we experienced during our lovely years in public education. And we were talking about what *should* have happened, how things could be better. He's not an artist, but we both saw that the saddest thing our education beat into us was a fear of failure. We learned conformity, of course, and that was a pretty terrible lesson, but more than that, we learned to play it safe, to only do what we knew we could do well. Because you are punished when you fail, ridiculed in front of the class, graded poorly. And don't you think it would be so much better if the reverse were true? If you were rewarded for taking risks? If the point were to explain what you were trying to accomplish and where it went wrong; to prove that you learned something rather than just produced something?

Once when I was in eighth grade my science teacher asked us to build an apple corer. Most of the students went for the straight-forward dropped-weight approach. Me? I designed a Rube Goldberg contraption with a marble and the whole shebang. The rickety thing fell apart before it even started, of course, because I have no engineering skills whatsoever. But my teacher looked at the design drawing and laughed so hard that she gave me a good grade anyway. It was the first time in my life that had ever happened. That someone rewarded me for ambition instead of achievement.

I wish I could remember that more often in my present life. Because I do fail on a pretty damn ambitious scale - I can't just make a tiny mistake like normal people, I have to completely destroy huge expensive canvases and shred brushes to useless snarls and waste pots and pots of paints. And I always feel like such a monumental failure afterwards that I want to crawl into a hole and never paint again. But I'm trying to tell myself that all those voices are wrong, that it's better I be a really spectacular failure than a perfectly ordinary success. And next week, goddamnit, I'm gonna buy some more paper and try again.