How to Heal (and Even Benefit) from a Setback or Failure in Your Art Practice: Inspired by Buddhist Teachings

Failure Comes To Us All

by Thea Fiore-Bloom, Ph.D.

Many authors and coaches tell creatives we need to get good at failure.

We must be “resilient” and “get back on the horse.”

Okay, I get that.

I mean, all experienced artists know their art practice only evolves if they can allow themselves to experiment, bomb, and recover on a regular basis.

But the thing is, some of our failures are doozies; they can leave us debilitated and doubting our calling.

And I don’t hear many experts telling us what we can actually do that will motivate us to pick those gravel bits out from our face, get up, and move forward.

(For my post on how to recover from a harsh art critique, go here.)

I recently discovered one way to recover from creative failure.

And my hope is that if I share it with you, it may help you deal better with your own face-down gravel drags.

The best way to explain my odd recovery process is by giving you an embarrassing example of an epic fail from my art life.

This story involves one wise guide, two-part epoxy, and three tenets from Buddhism.

Ready?

My Failure Story of Coming Unglued

I make these unusual, Joseph Cornell-like compositions inside vintage cigar boxes.

They’re based on myth and dream symbolism. They often contain tiny dollhouse antiques. I paint, wallpaper, sand, and age each piece.

I avoided selling my art for years because I harbored a secret fear.

A fear that did indeed come to pass.

Despite my best intentions, some bit or bob managed to come loose from my artwork during shipping.

My first customer wasn’t mad, she just let me know something to the effect of:

“Hey Thea, love the box, one of the antique metal chickens on top flew the coop—it fell off during shipping.”

I was flooded with embarrassment.

Okay, I reasoned to myself, I messed up, I stumbled, this is why I shouldn’t charge much for these boxes, I’ll get back up, buy better glue, and I won’t let this ever happen again.

I sold another box treated with the new glue.  I shipped it.

The customer gave me a glowing review on Etsy but wrote me a private note that casually mentioned how she had to whip out her own glue gun to stick a miniature boat back in place.

Because I was new to selling my work (or maybe because I’m both Italian and Jewish), the guilt was off the charts this time.

Boats and chickens falling off equaled shoddy craftsmanship which in my eyes equaled — bad artist.

Despite my boyfriend’s protests, instead of being compassionate with myself and looking at the failure as a learning opportunity, I decided to give up selling my art and stick to writing.

But soon, I missed the thrill of making and even selling art.

Failure and Maitri Meditation

One day I did what I thought was going to be a ho-hum Maitri meditation (which is a meditation about making friends with yourself when you’re in pain).

I was surprised to feel compassion for myself and my failure welling up inside me.

And throughout the meditation, this compassion grew. It allowed me to take my focus off failing and put it back on why I started making the boxes in the first place — for the love of it.

I also began remembering many affirming things I was told about my boxes (even if they did suffer from “stray chicken syndrome”.)

Suddenly I was driven to get off my butt mid-meditation, grab my laptop and start googling crazy queries like, “Why things fall off during shipping even when well glued?”

The Google Gods quickly whisked me to Canada, specifically to the website of gifted painter Laura den Hertog, who (with her sister Karen) had put together four free videos on how to ship your work, so it never gets damaged.

I learned a lot about external packaging from the videos but nothing about internal gluing.

Desperate, I threw a hail mary pass and sent an email to Den Hertog via her contact form to see if she had any answers to my glue problems.

Caveman Gets Shown a Bic Lighter

Den Hertog wrote back in 2 hours.

She had even popped over to my Etsy site and thought that the only glue that would survive shipping the kinds of things I was making was two-part epoxy.

(It’s the glue you mix together and have three minutes to work with before it adheres all your tools permanently to your counter.)

A curtain parted in my brain.

I was like a caveman being shown a Bic lighter for the first time.

Being the kind of gal who buys things she doesn’t yet need at hardware stores, I had some two-part epoxy in my house.

I ran downstairs, dug it out from under a sink, and clutched it to my chest; radiant with the hope I might become a real grown-up artist again.

With Hertog’s encouragement, I  proceeded to rip all the objects out of my boxes, reglue them with the 2 part epoxy and repair the scars that surgery left behind.

Miraculously, another box sold a few weeks later.

I shipped it and held my breath.

The result?

I received my best 5-star review yet, and no complaints about glue issues. I even had the guts to email the client and ask if there was any “chicken-fall-off syndrome.”

Nope.

Post-Glue-Gate Failure

After what I now refer to as “Glue-Gate,” my self-esteem slowly began to rise along with my prices.

So thanks to my failure and the wisdom of a more experienced artist, I no longer have as big a coronary as I used to when I got an Etsy notification that someone has kindly bought one of my boxes.

How about we take a quick look at four steps (inspired by Buddhism) that you can take if you need support after you feel you’ve failed?

Four Steps To Recovering from a Creative Setback or Failure

1st Post-Failure Recovery Step – Acknowledge the Suffering

Acknowledge the failure hurt.

The first noble truth of Buddhism is the truth of suffering.

The Buddha taught that life on earth is painful as well as beautiful.

 Buddhist teacher Tara Brach says by acknowledging our suffering we open the door to more beauty in our life.

It’s important to remember that you experienced failure while attempting to bring to life something your soul was urging you to try.

Now that’s commendable, so show yourself compassion.

2nd Post-Failure Recovery Step – Show Yourself Compassion

The meditation I was doing that led to my post-failure breakthrough is called Maitri or Loving Kindness meditation, popularized in the west by Vietnamese meditation master Thích Nhất Hạnh.

(You can learn more about Han and the philosophy of Maitri here).

Remember the role of compassion in my failure story?

It opened a blocked path in my mind so I could remember that I love making art — no matter who is watching.

And so do you.

 

3rd Post-Failure Recovery Step: Put Your Failure in Perspective 

Everybody Fails – Especially Successful Artists

Self-compassion allows us to see all artists fail, especially successful ones.

One thing I remembered during my meditation that helped me recover was a story a curator once whispered to me when I used to work at the Art Institute in Chicago.

He looked around to make sure the coast was clear before telling me that artist Julian Schnabel had a specially certified “plate crew” that went jetting about the globe.

Their only job?

To glue back all the fallen crockery that regularly crashed down and broke onto posh museum floors from Schnabel’s zillion-dollar “plate paintings.”

My point is creative setbacks and failures happen to everyone, but whether we grow stronger from them depends if you can do two things:

1. Mentally re-frame the failure and put it in the proper perspective.

2. Then, find a solution.

 

4th Post-Failure Recovery Step – Stay With the Problem

“It’s not that I’m so smart, it’s just that I stay with problems longer.”

— Albert Einstein

Super successful artists often are no more brilliant than we are, but they usually are more persistent. They tend to stay with their creative problems longer.

 

Take Georgia O’Keeffe, for example.  Early on in her painting life, O’Keeffe was disappointed with her combinations of color with form in her oil painting. She saw them as failures.

But instead of throwing in the towel, she persisted till she found her solution.

She arrived at her solution by rigorously restricting herself to using just black charcoal on white paper for months, only adding back one color at a time as she felt she understood the role of the previous color in her work.

O’Keeffe believed in herself and her work enough to stay with her problem, and so can we.

Pema Chodron on Failure

As beloved, humorous Buddhist teacher Pema Chodron would say, it’s just a matter of  “befriending our obstacles.“

So to sum it all up, in order to fail and rise up stronger, you may want to:

1. Acknowledge the pain or humiliation you feel.
2. Feel compassion for yourself.
3. Remember, all great creatives fail early and often.
4. Stay with the problem longer than feels comfortable to find your solution.

Now go make trouble more art.

“Failure is always hurtful, humiliating, and embarrassing, but it’s the price to pay for daring to get what we want out of life.” — Fabian Duttner

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Have you ever had a failure or major setback in your creative practice?

Would you like to be more compassionate with yourself?

What has helped you get back up?

Let us know in the comments at the end of the page.

You might like these other Charmed Studio posts:

Bye-Bye, Facebook: How Artists Can Succeed Without Social Media

Art Marketing for Introverts

Letting Go of Approval: A Story for Artists (That Involves Underwear)

How to Feel Better When Someone Unsubscribes

Why You Need a Feel Good File: The Emotional Rescue Tool No Creative Should Be Without

Transcending a Troll: O’Keeffe Shows Us a Way Out

Van Gogh Probably Didn’t Kill Himself

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If you’ve never had the pleasure of hearing Pema Chodron speak, play this short video.

She will make you laugh and make you think.