How to Make a Perfect Thing
Perfect has become something of a dirty word.
For people employed in creative pursuits, perfectionism is a classic hurdle, and there are a lot of articles about how to overcome it. They all have a point. The desire to do everything right can indeed throw a wrench into your creative process. It can grind your work to a halt, preventing you from finishing—or even from starting.
Nevertheless, perfection is a critical part of my creative process, and I suspect I’m not the only one. The concept of perfection is at the heart of the experiences that make us human: beauty, understanding, joy.
Step One: The Idea
In my experience, nothing you can do will force perfect ideas to occur; they just happen. All you can do is prepare the kinds of meals such ideas like, and hunt up or revisit perfect things—and they really do exist. I probably don't need to tell you that experiences of perfection are often private, and that one person's perfect things may differ from another's. A short list of mine include:
- Operators and Things, Barbara O'Brien
- The Cat's Home is the Cat, Raphael Matto
- Plots of the Julia-Fatou Sets by mathematicians Gaston Julia and Pierre Fatou
- God's Whisper, from Indigo Child (2015), Raury
- Blue Apple Tree, Piet Mondrian (1908-1909)
- The Two Virginias #4, Sally Mann (1991)
- Antimatter vs. Antimatter (2003), Xopher Davidson
Sometimes perfect things are found within a work—sometimes within something good, or ordinary, or even utterly terrible. I often find something of perfect beauty hidden within the mud and filth of commonplace ugliness. For me, this is a miracle; I live for these experiences.
- The black oval figure in the center of Composition VII, Vassily Kandinsky
- The first two piano notes in "Cherry Tree", in the eponymous album by The National
- The shape of the island of Gamla Stan, old city of Stockholm, Sweden
- The conversation between God and the Ocean in "The Only Meaning of the Oil-Wet Water", an otherwise repulsive short story in How We are Hungry, Dave Eggers
One word of warning: if you have something particular to say—such as a political or religious message—it is my opinion that it can’t be said in a creative medium. Either your work will be absorbed without a ripple by those who are already of your mind, or it will be left resentfully alone by those who are not.
None of us like being talked down to by strangers.
Lest it seem than I am against all art that carries a message, I should say that I am an enthusiastic consumer of sanctimonious mid-Victorian literature, Kara Walker's Insurrection! installation, and Soviet military songs. What I mean is that I don't think any of us can make art say what we want it to say. If your perfect idea can be explained in a lecture or essay, there is simply no need to make a story, a poem, or a painting about it.
Step Two: The Work
If you are an artist, work is likely to be the most delightful part of the process, even if you don't have the skills to make what you have in mind, even if you ruin everything, even if you find out (as I did, yesterday) that a painting you have put over 24 hours into just isn't salvageable. That's how you gain proficiency: you enjoy your work. I don’t mean to say that talent, skills, and experience are meaningless—they obviously count for a whole lot in making a perfect work of art—I am saying that work will eventually lead you to perfection. It will reveal more about your idea than anything else you can do. It will either show you that the idea is perfect (even if the end isn’t this time around) and worth pursuing, or it will show you that your idea is really a small part of a much larger perfect thing.
The stumbling block of perfectionism is the knowledge that as soon as you put the very first mark on the paper, you have the power to destroy your idea. Therefore, two big leaps of faith are involved in moving forward with your work:
One is to have faith that your idea is true,
The second is to trust that the idea will explain itself.
In the end, all that is really needed is for us to get out of the way.
Step Three: The End (or the Intermission)
It's hard for me to stop working. When I’m really into my work, it's like being in the middle of a beautiful dream, and I don't want it to end. We all have to wake up, though, and working endlessly will eventually destroy our artwork (and with it, our perfect idea). We have to learn to step away.
There are lots of ways to accomplish this, and I like to use them all. If you're a fine-detail artist like me, even pausing to lean back in your chair helps. Try to look at your painting from a distance. You can also look at it upside down, sideways, and in a mirror. You can take a photo and play around with the settings. Best of all, you can walk away for the day, and avoid looking at your work for a day, a week, a month. Whatever the length of time, by the time you see it again, both you and the art will have changed.
There is a kind of growing we do that is unconscious. We wake up in the morning with new feelings and ideas, as if something has happened to us in the night. A perfect thing will behave in the same way. It will change and develop over time, but its most important development occurs when you’re not looking. When you have put in as much work as the painting will take (and no more), the painting will be done. If you let it out into the world, it will become a person in its own right: learning, growing, and disseminating itself in its relationships with others.
Stopping—especially when you find you are having trouble tearing yourself away from your work—is the last principle of the creative process. It can be part of a cycle of working and stepping away from your work, or it can be the final act of completion.
How to Make a Perfect Thing: An Instruction Manual
1. Perfection exists: there are things in the world that are, in fact, perfect.
2. And they are the things that seed perfect ideas in our minds.
3. Making an idea into a material thing is bound to change it.
4. Change is a good thing; perfection cannot live without it.
6. The only way to make a perfect thing is to allow your perfect idea to change.
7. You cannot expect every painting you make to be perfect.
8. But you have to accept that one of them might be.
9. This is why perfection is the only thing that will truly move you as an artist.
10. Because it makes you love to work.
11. Perfection will never lead you wrong—everything else will.
12. The work itself will make you a fit instrument..
13. And the hope of making a perfect thing will produce art that is as close to perfection as is within your power.