September 28, 2021

Happy accidents

As an artist who deeply cares about their work that goes into the world, letting go is difficult. Embracing chance is difficult. My watercolour practice has taught me so many things so far, and one of its key lessons is to trust in chance.

Trusting in chance

People often remark that ‘watercolour is the most difficult medium’. They tend to say this followed by, “because you can’t go back over mistakes.” And whilst that’s true, it begs a different question – what’s a mistake?

Whenever I’m making something, I set out with a vision. I have an image in my mind (or roughed out on a computer) about where I’m heading. And yes, I try to get it there, as close as possible, but as I’ve written about before, the expectation is almost never met. Mistakes happen. But, like art itself, mistakes are in the eye of the beholder.

If no one else but me knows what I was supposed to do and didn’t, does anyone else notice the ‘mistake’? Maybe to the viewer, there are no mistakes?

A most happy accident

In 1902, a French street performer and magician, Melies, began to use one of the earliest film cameras ever made. Of course, these weren’t anything like the cameras we see today, but almost a hyper-mechanical ‘steampunk’ style contraption of running film over a lens. Think grease and oil. At the time, film was brand new, and the few people that had access to film cameras used them in a very static way – to record basic sequential action for a short period of time (about 90 seconds).

But, one day, Melies set up his camera to film traffic passing under a bridge, and the camera jammed just at a point when a bus was passing under it. He unjammed the mechanism a few minutes later, well and truly after the bus had moved on, but just at the moment, a hearse was passing under the bridge.

When Melies played back the footage, he was both delighted and surprised to see the bus magically replaced by the hearse in front of his very eyes. Melies had accidentally invented the jump-cut, the first real ‘special effect’ of film where anything could become anything or, in true magician style, simply vanish. It unlocked an entirely new way to think about film.

History is littered with stories like Melies’ – the happy accident. Quite often, it is the happy accident that helps us make huge leaps both in new technology but also in the way we think. They are near impossible to contrive because, well, then they wouldn’t be an accident, would they? But, I wonder, which conditions might provide a space where happy accidents are more likely to occur? In any objective view, Melies’ camera jam would be counted as a ‘mistake’ – a thing to fix; the resulting footage something throw away. But maybe it’s worth sharing the things we think are mistakes in case, well, to others, it’s an innovation.

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