The late American artist and PBS television host Bob Ross once said, “We (artists) don’t make mistakes, just happy little accidents.”
Indeed, when Chatter asked Chattanooga area artists if they had learned as much from their mistakes as from their successes, several answered with a resounding “yes.” The key is to earn a livelihood, and it takes trial and error to figure out what sells, they said.
James Tucker, a 73-year-old painter who lives in Sewanee, Tennessee, calls his unsuccessful artworks “fruitful failures.”
“Of course you will fail quite often,” says Tucker, who shows his work at In-Town Gallery on Frazier Avenue in Chattanooga. “No big deal; the waste basket is your friend … No one is going to die if I botch a day’s work.”
The key to success for an artist is to work consistently, he says, and “to not worry too much about progress or achievement … If you have the humility to learn your craft and the perseverance to work at it, those things will come, though there are many days when that doesn’t seem possible.”