The Sacred Nature of Mistakes: Unlocking Creative Growth

Discover how mistakes can fuel your artistic process, refine your vision, and lead to unexpected breakthroughs. Learn why creativity experts believe there’s power in the imperfection.

THE CREATIVE

Welcome to The Creative. Twice a month I share quotes from the books, Art is the Highest Form of Hope and The Creative Act. I find perspectives on the creative process to be so meta when it comes to life. We are a creative process and everything we do is subject to the same rules. Creation is non-linear. It's messy. It moves forward and backward. And also gets stuck. Oftentimes we do not realize the purpose of a singular creative process until years later. Creativity likes to surprise us. 

“Mistakes are almost always of a sacred nature.” - Salvador Dali

I’m probably one of the only creativity experts out there who will tell you that yes, there are absolutely mistakes in art. Gasp! I know, right?! But if you are creative for a living and your ingenuity is high stakes, then you know that yeah, there are most definitely mistakes in art no matter how you practice. A figure drawing that is intended to realistically represent the model can go horribly wrong if the proportion between the shoulder and elbow is incorrect. If the perspective is shortened or elongated on any of the limbs. A logo that is not clearly readable at multiple print sizes. These are mistakes and they are evident. This is why as creative professionals we seek feedback and engage in critiques. We don't want to make these mistakes and so we seek out help in illuminating them. Few things can distract from the overall composition of a presented body of work than a mistake of perspective or composition. It’s like reading a newspaper article with a typo. It burns the eyes a bit. 

There are “no mistakes in art” quotes have been overused in social media spaces, encouraging those who fear the artistic process to dive in. There are no mistakes, you can do it, keep going, etc. And these platitudes are lovely, but play out as vapid to professionals. I imagine that the sacred nature of mistakes is that they enable us to dive into our skillset. To see where weaknesses might be, to challenge us to solve a problem differently. Or to let the mistake lead somewhere else entirely. Mistakes can change the nature of a piece of work. What happened accidentally might provide the true essence of a work and enable us to create something we didn’t know was possible. Mistakes can lead to experimentation. But this is a different kind of mistake than the one I mentioned above. Sometimes an entire painting is a mistake. We might not know it at the time. That mistake is likely to lead us to something better, more refined. A clearer expression. It is how mistakes encourage us to think critically about our work and to refine our process. This is where the sacred lies. 

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