Kat Johnston Sketch - a little pair of dandelions sitting in the grass, a little rough sketching to make the day go past.

Just a little picture drawn quickly to get something up by early afternoon. I’ve been doing a lot of dandelions recently, for some reason. I think I’m going to make them the little ‘symbol’ for Atelodemiourgiopapyrophobia, a fear of imperfect creative activity on paper. When you can’t think of something to draw, you might as well draw dandelions, yes? Ahh, my ‘fear of drawing on an empty page’ phobia is getting a little life of its own here… but I’m going with it.

I think it would actually be a great name for an exhibition: a showing of sketchbooks, of works on paper, the great and brilliant pieces mixed in with the ones that probably get overlooked even by the artist themselves… in other words, pointing out the fact that each and every thing drawn, painted and roughed out is important in its own right. Each one is a step forward, each failure a step closer to an even better failure; sometimes success.

How would we polish our skills without trying things and seeing if they work? How are we ever going to advance ourselves and challenge the boundaries of what we do if we don’t give it a go? If you never reach for the stars, then there is no chance that you are ever going to reach them unless you ride on the coattails of someone who can. A song comes to mind, actually – They All Laughed, a great Gershwin song from 1937.

I can’t count the number of things that I have just stumbled upon by simply giving it a go, trying something new and often stepping back afterwards and going ‘oh my god… that’s horrible’. The fun thing with that though is that we know what not to do next time. That said, I admit I’ll often try it over, because you never know quite when the first time was just a fluke. Find glory in the failures, fail in style and never forget that not ever failure is quite what it seems from the outset. Accidental discoveries such as silly putty would never have happened without it! Yes, there are more significant discoveries than silly putty, but hey, its so funnnnnn!

Just a little note saying thank you also to QUT’s Artisan newsletter for including a link to the site – I had a whooping 194 visits to the site yesterday, with five more wonderful responses to the survey. Thank you QUT, thanks to those who visited and to those who have yet to visit but probably will.