The risk of failure

Loved Tom Hopkins, our sales guru in the 80s I think it was! I've been an entrepreneur most of my life. You have to be self-motivated. And not beat yourself up. I have mostly been good at the first one, not so good at the second one. Til now. I LOVE my work that's coming out of me at the tender age of 70! I have studied feng shui along with many many other things and I'm prospering, feeling confident and raising my prices. My mixed media abstracts aren't for everyone and that's OKAY! They are selling. That's a good thing, and I continue to find my voice.

"The boats are sheltered in the ports. But staying there isn't their vocation."

The image of you pulling out a pack of cards to explain poker math to your civil servant father honestly made me laugh out loud. That moment captures something real about what it takes to bet on yourself. Every artist in here has had some version of that conversation.

Good song great voice! I was a professional singer in my younger days so I should know.

The creative process entails an unconditional commitment to a form of intrinsic responsibility, distinct from the usual ethical or deontological understanding. It is rather an ontological responsibility, that of a full and wholehearted presence in the act of making. Each intervention, every operative choice, instantly projects a potential configuration of the world, conferring upon the action a singular immanence. In this context, the idea of a critical distance or an external perspective, allowing detached observation or preliminary experimentation, proves ill-suited. The creator does not position themselves as an external observer of a phenomenon to be evaluated; they immerse themselves resolutely in a process in which the reality being shaped reveals itself simultaneously as the entity they generate and that they apprehend. This co-production and co-discovery characterize the very essence of creative engagement, where intention and manifestation are inextricably linked, with no possibility of secure retreat or epistemic neutrality. The work is not a post-reflexive product, but an actively lived emergence, engaging the totality of the being in its manifestation.

Given this dynamic, the use of the term "failure" within the creative process appears semantically incongruous. What is commonly designated as such often represents an unforeseen divergence, an unexpected branching away from a trajectory or coherence initially envisaged, or even an intrinsic opposition of the matter or the constraints of the medium. Far from being an obstacle to the completion of the work, this fundamental resistance constitutes an essential catalyst of its vitality and authenticity. Indeed, it is through the constant dialogue with these constraining forces that the work acquires its specificity and depth. The absence of such frictions would inevitably lead to sterile production, characterized by the simple reproduction of preexisting schemes, the substance-free simulation, or the establishment of a purely superficial decor, devoid of real resonance. The confrontation with the unexpected and the intractable is what confers to creation its capacity to generate the new and the organic, transcending mere execution to reach a form of living and complex emergence that defies all predictability.

The artwork, in this perspective, manifests itself as a dynamic and persistent enigma, radically distinguishing itself from an engineering problem or a single-solution equation. It does not lend itself to methodical resolution or to a complete analytical deconstruction, demanding rather the establishment of an interactive and reflective relationship on the part of the one who perceives or interprets it. This form of relational engagement evokes a quasi-sacred dimension, not in the sense of religious dogmas or confessional institutions, but in the sense of a space where lived experience cannot be wholly subsumed by a utilitarian end, an instrumental functionality, or a rigid professional classification. There emerges therefrom an excess, a surplus of meaning and presence that resists any attempt at exhaustive rationalization or economic quantification. This irreducible part, this "given" that exceeds mere calculability, confers upon the work its capacity to challenge us beyond its use value or its practical effectiveness, inscribing its existence in a sphere where meaning and experience prime over the logic of yield or productivity. It invites contemplation that transcends pragmatism and functionalism, opening onto a dimension of alterity.

This intrinsic essence of creation justifies why it cannot be entirely circumscribed by the notion of "craft" or of "profession" in the conventional sense. A craft generally implies an ensemble of predictable results, the application of established procedures and the demonstration of proven technical mastery, all within a framework of defined skills and expectations. Creation, by contrast, is characterized by a fundamental disposition to embrace the unknown, to venture beyond mapped territories, even when this exploration engenders a profound questioning of the established reference frames and acquired certainties. It mobilizes the individual in their totality, engaging not only the intellect but also the body in a concrete and tangible experience. This immersion in uncertainty induces inherent risk-taking, where safety margins are deliberately reduced, and where the artist may sometimes experience a form of existential vertigo in the face of the immensity of possibilities and the absence of pre-established signposts. It is in this confrontation with the unmasterable that its transformative power resides, far beyond normative demands of professional practice, more akin to an existential quest than to a simple application of know-how.

The analogy of the game, as it unfolds with tokens on a board, eloquently illustrates this fundamental dynamic: it assumes a tacit acceptance that the normativity, or the set of rules governing the activity, does not preexist entirely to the playful process itself, but reveals itself and is constituted progressively as the game develops. The artist, in this metaphor, embodies the figure of the one who maintains their engagement in action, even in the face of increasing instability or a questioning of the structuring conventions. It is precisely within this zone of uncertainty and normative fluidity that essential manifestations are likely to emerge. It is no longer a matter of judging the result by a binary dichotomy of success or failure, these categories being insufficient to grasp the complexity of the phenomenon. It is rather a matter of witnessing the emergence of meaning as a dynamic and continuous process, an active genesis of meaning that unfolds in the present moment and whose value lies less in a predefined end than in its own actualization. It is in this laboratory of constant experimentation that creation reveals its true reach, escaping the usual criteria of evaluation. And for the rest... It is a real adventure. @Caliban RAMIREZ