Prompt 283. The Art in Failure

& pianist Jonathan Biss on truly letting go

Hi friend, 

In preparation for my first art exhibit in June, I’ve spent the last month painting. It’s my first time back at a daily practice since our last 100-day project, and so many things have come up. Two years ago, when I first began working in watercolors, part of the joy was that I was doing it purely for myself, with no expectation of being good or bad at it. For me, that’s the most delicious creative place to be, when it’s pure exploration and experimentation. Now, knowing that these pieces will be on display, I find my head buzzing with doubts and questions. I think, I’m not a painter. Do I have the ability to realize my vision? Will I embarrass myself? Will I fail?

But even as I wrestle with the ego’s chorus of voices, I know that watercolor demands a kind of surrender. The painter is not the only agent of the watercolor’s movement—part of the beauty is how the paint bleeds and blooms across the canvas. As the renowned watercolorist Nita Engl said, “Because watercolor actually moves on the paper, it’s the most active of all mediums, almost a performance art.” It’s an aquatic collaboration, a fluid dance.

As someone who has been trying to wriggle free from perfectionist tendencies for my whole life, this can sometimes feel like a mixed bag. I come up with a solid plan for a painting, but it almost immediately goes awry. I sketch a shape, but when I go to paint, the watercolor moves beyond that contour, and I feel terribly disappointed and think, “I’ve made a mess.” However, in the last month, I’ve noticed that the moments that feel like failure—when the colors mix together in a way that I didn’t plan, when I think something’s ugly or bad—often end up being my favorite parts of the paintings.

For example, at one point when I was working on my jellyfish painting, I had too much water in my brush, and a huge splotch fell onto the far edge of the canvas where I had not intended a jellyfish to go. So I surrendered, and I painted a jellyfish within the paint splotch. Afterward, I realized that it somehow looked more jellyfish-like than any of the others. It had a kind of bioluminescent halo. I liked it so much that I went back and dropped more splotches, allowing halos to bloom in those places too.

In another painting, I had imagined a sky filled with highly detailed birds. I began by painting the background, but I was impatient and didn’t allow it to fully dry. So when I went in with a very fine brush to outline a sharp contour of the bird’s wing, it immediately smudged into a mess. My temptation at first was to try to correct it: to paint over everything with a deeper blue, let it fully dry, then repaint the birds. But when I returned to the painting the next day, I realized that I loved the movement and the mystery in the smudged wings.

I’m still working on this painting, still figuring it out. And as I try and fail and try again, I’m not only learning new skills and techniques, I’m trying to let go and lean into the magic of what at first glance I might deem as mistakes. My mom, Anne Francey, is a great teacher in this—she’s a brilliant artist who, since early in my experiment with painting, has been teaching me to allow the creative process to unfold and to love the messes. The day before my transplant, I was painting an underwater scene of a woman surrounded by sea creatures. “It looks un peu art brute,” I said to her—a little raw and self-taught. “How do I make it less so?”

“It looks like what it is,” she said. “You should not try to make it look like something else.”

My mom lives in Tunisia now, where she’s working on a community art project that she began before my relapse. It’s hard to be away from her, but in this last month, we’ve connected again and again through painting. When I get to a point where I think I’ve ruined a piece, I Facetime her. Inevitably she points to the area that I think is most disastrous and says, “This is where the energy is.” This lesson is axis-shifting to me both creatively and personally. The perfectionistic impulse—the need to be unimpeachably good—can be extremely limiting. You end up trying to “fix” whatever it is you think is wrong or bad before the thing unfolds, before you can really behold it and see its beauty.

With that, I’ll turn to today’s essay and prompt, which is the final installment of our collaboration with Princeton University Concerts for their Impromptu Challenge writing contest. It’s by the classical pianist Jonathan Biss, adapted from his stunning audiobook, Unquiet: My Life with Beethoven. May it help you see the art in failure and experience the euphoria of letting go.

Sending love, 

Suleika

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Pablo Picasso, Three Musicians (1921)

Prompt 283. Toward Acceptance by Jonathan Biss

(excerpted from Unquiet: My Life with Beethoven)

First, tell no lies.

It is the closest thing I have to a guiding principle, as an artist and person. It is my Hippocratic Oath, if Hippocrates were Sophocles. It is not as self-evident as it sounds.

Being a classical musician is a strange and daunting vocation: you have the responsibility of bringing someone else’s notes—ideas—soul—to life. Until you play, that soul stays silent. But can you ever really know someone else’s soul? When those notes come from the greatest composers, the ones with uncommon insight and the skill to translate that insight into sound, they pose more questions than they offer answers; they are more like koans than declarative sentences. You can spend a lifetime looking for the truth in them, and still fall short.

If you’re a professional musician, though, you can’t wait a lifetime—or even for the moment of inspiration—to play your concerts. They arrive when they arrive, planned one or two or three years in advance. And when they do, your uncertainties and insecurities are of no relevance to your audience, who have paid their money and made their choice to spend the evening listening to you and thus not reading Proust or watching the Kardashians or re-alphabetizing their spices. You have to play, or that audience hears nothing.

If that audience is going to hear and, more to the point, feel something, you had damned well better project certainty about what it is you want to say, even though the music, in its complexity and its foreignness to you and its maddening imprecision of notation, is bound to fill you with doubt.

So, what do you do? You perform. You perform conviction in your choices, even when others start to seem equally or more valid. You perform the belief that you are up to the task, even though when the task is bringing a great work of art to life, that belief is egomaniacal and probably a little delusional. You perform unequivocal delight at doing what you are doing, swallowing back the fear of exposing yourself so thoroughly, the exhaustion and loneliness of an itinerant life, and the bemusement at the utter oddness of walking onto a stage wearing uncomfortable shoes, bowing to an assembled group of strangers, and then playing for them without ever looking them in the eye.

You perform. You bare yourself before the audience, but you do so in costume. It’s a paradox and a high-wire act, one that feels exhilarating when it succeeds and completely shitty when it fails. And then there are all the other concerts, the in-between ones, in which some things work better than others, the small failures feeling larger than they are. And when those small failures begin to deflate you, you wear your performer’s instinct like armor, working so hard to project the music to the hopefully unwitting audience that you not only worry that you are no longer telling the truth—you forget what the truth is.

So. Telling no lies turns out to be very difficult. To have so much as a fighting chance of doing so, you must accept that even when you want very much to do something—the “something” in this case being to play the music you love most, not just more than most other music, but than most other things, and to play it with vividness and precision and enough fantasy to make it seem like it is being imagined in real time, and enough insight to make it sound emotionally coherent even though it springs from someone else’s imagination, and then also to be admired and loved for that vividness and precision and fantasy and insight, because for all your talk of serving the composer, of being merely a vessel through which the music flows, you have the ego of an artist, which is to say a monster—you must accept that failing to do so is not a catastrophe. 

The only hope is in acceptance. It will not save you from failure, but it will help you fail honestly and well. If you’re lucky, it might even help you find the art in failure, and the strange euphoria—the art and the euphoria that come only when you truly let go.

Your prompt for the week:

Write about a time you saw the art in failure—when you felt the euphoria of truly letting go. 

Today’s Contributor—

Jonathan Biss is a world renowned pianist who channels his deep musical curiosity into performances and projects in the concert hall and beyond. In addition to performing with leading orchestras, he continues to expand his reputation as a teacher, musical thinker, and one of the great Beethoven interpreters of our time. He has written extensively about the music he plays and has authored four audio- and e-books, including Unquiet: My Life with Beethoven, the first Audible Original by a classical musician. Recognized with numerous honors, including Lincoln Center’s Martin E. Segal Award, an Avery Fisher Career Grant, and the Borletti-Buitoni Trust Award, he is Co-Artistic Director of the Marlboro Music Festival, where he has spent fourteen summers, and is also on the piano faculty of the New England Conservatory. Photo by Benjamin Ealovega.

Today’s prompt is part of our collaboration with the Princeton University Concerts for their annual Creative Reactions and Audience Voices Writing Contests. Inspired by the 2023-24 Healing with Music series, we’re inviting music lovers of all ages to reflect on their relationship with music. Learn more about the challenge and submit your work below!

If you’d like, you can post your response to today’s prompt in the comments section, in our Facebook group, or on Instagram by tagging @theisolationjournals. As a reminder, we love seeing your work inspired by the Isolation Journals, but to preserve this as a community space, we request no promotion of outside projects.

For more paid subscriber benefits, see—

• On Failure, a video replay of my Studio Visit with another of my great teachers in acceptance, my husband Jon Batiste, where we talked about the importance of “getting your rejection in”

• Haunted by Heartbreak, an installment of my advice column Dear Susu, where I wrote about the trick mirror of regret, accepting the past, and the myth of “moving on”

• American Symphony: A Conversation, where Jon and I talked with director Matt Heineman about the magic of creative exploration—of opening doors and seeing what’s behind them, of allowing things to unfold naturally, both in art and life