DAY 21 - Back to the Drawing Board, Chesterton and Doing Work BADLY

I actually started this journey of getting back into art before I found out I had gastric cancer. 

When I hit age 60 (November 2017) I decided I would try writing and blogging. I liked to write and I figured it was now or never to make an effort. Not many months after that birthday, I was talking to a minister friend of mine about the fact that, in addition to learning to write, I also wanted to start drawing and painting.

There was a time when I’d really been into art. But now it felt to me like pursuing those interests (at my age) might be a waste of my time. I’d decided (at the wise old age of 18) that there must be a better way to serve God than drawing pictures, and by age 35 or so, I’d completely given up any practiced effort to improve my skills. Now, I was hesitant about relearning those skills. And I was hesitant about my ability to create anything of quality.

My friend asked if I was familiar with the writings of G. K. Chesterton. I admitted I was not. We were sitting in his office and he reached up and pulled a book from a shelf. He opened to a page on which appeared the following quote:

"If a thing is worth doing, it is worth doing badly."

At first, I didn’t know whether I should be puzzled or insulted. Then he explained that Chesterton believed that anything that was worth doing well was also worth doing, at the start, badly; that it was worth the time that it took to practice. 

“You might have to create some bad art in order to create good art,” my friend explained.

That idea stuck with me. I did a little research and found that, in this quote, Chesterton is talking about parenting. Chesterton lived from 1874 to 1936. In his time there was a social engineering push to treat the raising of a child as something that was best accomplished by professionals. He strongly disagreed. He believed that parents were responsible for, and the best candidates for, the upbringing of their own children. And he believed this to be true even though most parents are “amateurs” at parenting (maybe not even really good at it).

My friend was drawing a parallel between Chesterton’s ideas about parenting and my own ideas about drawing, painting, and creating. A parent must DO parenting in order to learn to BE a parent. As a writer, who also wants to draw and illustrate, I must DO the work of drawing (even if badly) if I want to BE one who draws and illustrates well.