Failing Towards Brilliance
On Painting My mother and Learning to Let Go
This project began as an exploration of failure—not the kind you learn from in a tidy, feel-good way, but the messy, emotional kind that throws you off balance. I set out to paint a portrait of my mother, who passed away this February, with the intention of letting go: of perfectionism, of control, of the need to get it “right.” I wanted to see what would happen if I leaned into not knowing—if I allowed the process to guide me. Spoiler: it didn’t go the way I imagined.
The original photograph of my mother that inspired this project.
The project was deeply inspired by Arshile Gorky’s The Artist and His Mother, a painting he worked and reworked over ten years. Gorky, a pioneering figure in American abstract art, was born in Van, an Armenian city in the Ottoman Empire. Though he escaped the Armenian Genocide by immigrating to North America, his mother died of starvation—a loss that left a permanent mark on his work and life.
Gorky based the painting on a childhood photograph and returned to the image again and again, seemingly unable to bring it to completion. He once said, “When something is finished that means it’s dead, doesn’t it? I believe in everlastingness. [...] The thing to do is to always keep starting to paint, never to finish painting.” That relentless pursuit—the inability to arrive at a final version—reads, to me, as a form of failure. But taken as a whole, his iterations propelled him toward abstraction, becoming foundational to his revolutionary visual language. His struggle exemplifies how failure can shape transformation.
Like Gorky, I am part of the Armenian diaspora and the granddaughter of genocide survivors. My own mother’s death added another layer of resonance to Gorky’s loss. I saw his decade-long engagement with that photograph as a conversation with his lost mother, and I wanted to explore that idea—art as dialogue, as emotional labor.
“Each failed layer wasn’t a detour; it was the work.”
This painting was never about likeness. It was about trying to give form to the emotional weight of grief—both personal and collective. I believed the process might be healing, even liberating. But what I found instead was frustration, doubt, and a kind of obsession that mirrored Gorky’s.
I titled the project Failing Towards Brilliance because I hoped the act of failure might generate new creative possibilities. I imagined a chance to loosen up—to play, to experiment, to find beauty in the mess. Instead, I became trapped in a cycle of painting, scraping, layering, and erasing. I’d hoped to feel free, but mostly I felt like I was flailing.
Looking back, I think I was trying to reconcile two opposing parts of myself: the one that craves spontaneity, and the one that needs structure and clarity. Spoiler #2: structure won.
My position as both daughter and artist complicated every decision. I wasn’t just painting a face—I was painting love, memory, and loss, all at once. Each failed attempt felt like a betrayal of that complexity. Every time I scraped the face away, I felt both grief and guilt. The failure wasn’t technical—it was emotional. And it was mine.
The painting began with layers of oil glazes, chosen for their transparency and ability to hold the ghosts of previous images. This technique allowed me to build and destroy in the same gesture, leaving behind traces of what was. Initially, I imagined this method would encourage looseness and emotional rawness. But instead, I found myself in a cycle of dissatisfaction and erasure, unable to commit to any version of my mother’s image.
Eventually, I abandoned the glazing process. It simply wasn’t working. I shifted to thick, opaque paint—both as a practical reset and a psychological one. This wasn’t a breakthrough so much as an act of survival. I needed a different way forward, even if I didn’t know what that was.
Gorky’s struggle became a mirror to mine. In Black Angel: The Life of Arshile Gorky, Nouritza Matossian writes, “His failures did not defeat him—they were his medium.” That line stayed with me. I wasn’t just making a painting—I was making and unmaking myself through the act. Each failed layer wasn’t a detour; it was the work.
Throughout the process, I kept trying to hold onto the project’s original intention—to “fail productively”—even as the emotional weight grew heavier. I hoped failure would be freeing, but instead, it felt crushing. Still, I kept going. Rick Rubin’s The Creative Act gave me a thread to hold onto: “Mistakes are not detours. They are the path.” I clung to that idea, even when I wasn’t sure I believed it.
I wish I could tell you this project changed my relationship to failure. But I struggled—viscerally—with the discomfort of not liking what I was making. The painting infected everything else. I couldn’t even work on other pieces while it sat nearby.
And yet, because I was working on multiple projects at once, I had a startling realization: I can feel two opposite things at the same time. One day, I felt like a failure—a terrible artist. The next, after hiding the offending portrait, I felt like a genius while working on something else. This duality reminded me: just because I feel like a failure doesn’t mean I am one. Today might be hard, but tomorrow can be different.
In future work, I think I’ll explore morphing or abstracting faces rather than aiming for likeness—an idea that emerged but which I couldn’t pursue within this project. But it continues to haunt me, and I think that’s a sign it’s worth following.
This painting also belongs to a diasporic Armenian lineage, both thematically and formally. Like Gorky, I couldn’t “finish” the image of my mother—not because of technical limitations, but because the subject defied completion. My mother—like the Armenian past—is not a fixed presence, but a composite of memory, gesture, and unresolved history.
“When something is finished that means it’s dead, doesn’t it? I believe in everlastingness. [...] The thing to do is to always keep starting to paint, never to finish painting.”
Matossian wrote that Gorky’s portrait of himself and his mother was more than just a painting. She said, “His homage to his mother was bound to take on a sacred quality [...] By painting his mother, he saved her from oblivion, snatching her at last from the pile of corpses to place her on a pedestal.” That line hits hard. Perhaps this is what made the project so difficult. I wasn’t just painting—I was trying to do something sacred, something that felt like an act of rescue.
If I learned anything from this, it’s that the way I normally work—structured, deliberate—isn’t a flaw. It’s a container. I don’t need to beat myself up for not thriving in chaos. There’s no one right way to be an artist. This project taught me to respect how I work best, even as I remain open to change.
Something from this experience will carry into my next work—I just don’t know what yet. I need time and space to let it settle. I may try again to surrender to the unknown, but I’ll do so with more honesty, more caution, and—hopefully—more kindness toward myself.
In the end, this painting didn’t liberate me. It wasn’t the playful, experimental process I hoped for. But it became something else: a record of struggle, of expectation meeting reality, of failure not as a creative strategy, but as a lived emotional experience. And that, too, is worth holding.
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Further reading!
Black Angel: The Life of Arshile Gorky by Nouritza Matossian.
A Biography of Arshile Gorky by an Armenian diasporan (a very important point since I found that many non Armenians with no background in our particular intergenerational trauma failed to position themselves properly when interpreting and writing about gorky’s work.
Arhile Gorky Adoian by Karlen Mooradian.
A more art historical look at Gorky’s work.
Rethinking Ashile Gorky by Kim S Theriault.
I found this art criticism resource on Gorky's work to be both refreshing and exceptionally well-positioned.
The Creative Act: Away of Being By Rick Rubin and Neil Strauss
Although I do not endorse all of what is said in this book, I would say that it is a way to ignite a different perspective when approaching art and creation.
