What's Luck Got To Do With It?
Head On Again. Oil, cold wax and collage on board, 75cm x 55cm x 4cm. Anne Kearney, 2021.
My painting, Head On Again, recently won first place at the 2024 Cold Wax International Juried Exhibition. I am enormously grateful and pleased. Grateful, pleased…and lucky.
What does luck have to do with it? As the jurist Dan Addington wrote, “I believe any juror could have approached such a large group of accomplished entries and curated a number of different shows from the available options, because the work entered was of such a high quality.”
I am proud of my piece, but I also have to admit that with a different juror it might not have been a prize-winner or even have been selected for the exhibition.
And yet, even as I write this, there is a persistent voice in my head saying, “That wasn’t luck, that was merit. I deserved it!”
People might say they believe in luck but when push comes to shove, they often discount it. I am no exception. Our brains evolved to code causality as one way to make sense of the world. That is our superpower. But it can also be our kryptonite. Ambiguity, randomness, and the unexplained can leave us cognitively weakened by confusion and uncertainty. And so we fabricate explanations in hindsight for the things we didn’t see coming. And we cling to these stories even when they are wrong.
The human drive to make sense of the world explains people’s initial responses upon hearing about my brother’s unexpected death: “What caused it? How could that be? What were the signs?” And why some people were unable to let the questioning go until I mentioned that he had a cough and seemed tired. “Ahh,” they would exhale, with the relief that comes from the creation of understanding.
The power of chance is easier for me to see in the context of my art practice than in the rest of my life.
I am well aware that as soon as I release an artwork into the world, any vestiges of control slip quickly through my fingers. Viewers interact with my paintings in environments comprised of a myriad of factors affecting what and how they see. That complexity is magnified many-fold as the viewers’ own idiosyncratic thoughts, attitudes, and history are brought to bear on their perceptions and opinions.
Even before my artwork leaves the studio it has been pushed and pulled, battered and enhanced, destroyed and salvaged by many factors outside of my control. So much of our thoughts, decisions, and behavior are influenced by our environments and by subconscious activity in the brain. An artwork’s voyage through the complex space between my intentions and its finished state is one that I can rarely explain because most of that space is hidden from me. Although if pressed I will happily create a straightforward tale.
For me, interacting with these unknowable forces is part of the joy of creating art. I revel in the dance – which is often more of a struggle – between me, my materials, and the millions of other things that unknowingly come into play.
Probably because of this, my favorite art materials and processes are those over which there is an inherent lack of control. Where the opportunity for luck to strike (or not) is high. Where discoveries can be made.
Paradoxically even as I rail against the idea that randomness and bad luck can determine the fate of someone I love, I embrace the mercurial element of chance in my studio.
A studio full of paper marbling experiments.
Most recently, I have been welcoming the unpredictable in paper marbling. My studio floor is strewn with the results of my experiments – mostly self-proclaimed failures as I play with temperature, paint mixtures, water thickness, and a deliberate breaking of the rules. But there have also been some successes.
I am getting better at controlling my materials and I am beginning to see how I might incorporate this technique into my new body of work. This is where perseverance and skill building come in.
Acknowledging the role of luck doesn’t require believing that hard work and skill are unimportant – of course they are important. An art competition is not won by pure chance. It is not a lottery. Learning and developing my craft and working to share my art helps set the stage on which lucky circumstances could play out.
We have to believe that we are at least partially in control of our own destinies because that is what keeps us motivated, keeps us interacting with the world, keeps us sane. This belief in self-determination is what psychologists call an “internal locus of control,” and it is psychologically healthy.
But too much of a good thing can backfire and an unbalanced view of the luck versus merit equation can lead to problems. Many people firmly believe that their successes are due to their own merit rather than lucky circumstances of birth, resources, or being in the right place at the right time. They correspondingly believe that the comparative failures of others reflect lack of skill, drive, or intelligence.
These misattributions serve to justify inequality and downplay the importance of programs that level the playing field. Paradoxically, many of the same people who think they are wholly responsible for their good fortune blame their failures on rigged systems and external circumstances.
I know artists who go at it the other way, feeling that their successes are mere luck and that their failures are a commentary on their own skill and merit rather than the result of forces beyond their control.
A recent marbling success! -Anne Kearney
Making peace with cognitive messiness can be hard. It takes a certain frame of mind to accept that some things are the result of your own efforts and intentions, some things are simply a function of chance, and most things are a combination of the two.
My doctor here in Barcelona brushed away my attempts to enlist him in creating a straightforward story for understanding my brother’s death. “I know it’s hard to hear,” he said, “But it sounds like it was mostly really bad luck.”
In the absence of the cognitive calm that comes from a tidy narrative, I’ve been trying to turn the notion of luck on its head. Given the number of things in the universe that had to happen just so, my beloved brother’s very existence was completely improbable. How lucky I was to have known him.
In the end, all any of us can do is focus on the things that are in our control in order to create an environment in which good luck is more probable than bad. This is as true in our art practices as it is in the rest of our lives. I try to make healthy choices. I experiment and explore in the studio. I continue to apply to exhibitions.
And when I do have successes – whether they are due to luck, skill, or some unknowable combination of the two – I celebrate them. As my son said after I told him about my art prize, “We don’t make art for the external validation, but it sure is sweet when it comes.”
P.S. As part of the 2024 Cold Wax International Exhibition, jurist Dan Addington gave a generous and insightful look into the jury process and you can watch it here. You can also read his exhibition notes here.
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