Go Ahead, Ruin the Canvas! What I learned by Making Mistakes.

People sometimes assume that after twenty years of working in my Zafer style, the painting must come easily now. They imagine that the colours fall into place, that the little circles and triangles and dots arrange themselves without effort, and that a painter who has done this for two decades has somehow moved beyond the stage of getting things wrong. I wish I could tell them this is true. The honest answer is that there is not a single painting of mine that does not go wrong at some point. Not one. Every canvas, without exception, reaches a moment where I look at it and feel that something has failed. So go ahead, ruin the Canvas! What I learned by making mistakes is that mistakes do not exist. I have come to believe that this is not a weakness in my process. It is the process. The mistake is where the painting actually happens.

Pirogues in Rodrigues - 2025

Painting without a plan

To understand why I make so many mistakes, you have to understand how I paint. I plan nothing in advance. I do sketch the composition in advance, but I never map out the colours or decide in advance how the geometry will be distributed across the surface. I work on pure intuition. I begin somewhere, often without knowing where the painting wants to go, and I follow it.

This way of working is the source of almost everything I love about painting in my style. It keeps the work alive. It allows the canvas to surprise me, and a painting that surprises me has a much better chance of surprising my wife, Carol, who is the first to criticise my art! But intuition has a price. When you refuse to plan, you walk straight into problems that planning would have spared you. You commit to a colour before you know whether it belongs. You build a shape before you know whether the shape next to it can survive the company. And so you make mistakes, constantly, because you are discovering the painting at the same time as you are painting it.

I would not trade this for a safer method. The mistakes are simply the toll I pay for working the way I need to work.

The trouble with colour

Most of my struggles are with colour. This will not surprise anyone who has tried to balance a painting built, as mine are, from vibrant flat colours, sitting side by side with no shading to soften the meeting between them. When colours are flat and bold, each one is a strong personality. Put two strong personalities next to each other, and they either love each other or they fight. There is rarely a quiet middle ground.

So I find myself again and again in what I can only call a colour dilemma. I lay down a colour that felt right in my hand, and then the scene refuses it. The blue is too strong compared to the surrounding sky. The red pulls the eye away from where I want it to rest. The whole harmony of the painting tilts, and a piece that was coming together suddenly feels broken. When this happens, there is no shortcut. I repaint. Sometimes I repaint large areas, covering work that took hours, because a single colour was too strong or simply out of tune with everything else on the canvas. It can be painful to paint over something you spent real time on. But a painting is a whole, not a collection of parts, and one wrong colour can pull the whole thing down with it.

What has changed over twenty years is not that I make fewer of these mistakes. It is that I now recognise them faster, and I have learned to listen to the small discomfort that tells me something is off before it becomes a disaster. That instinct did not come from getting things right. It came from getting things wrong hundreds of times and paying attention each time.

The trouble with geometry

The other place I stumble is in the geometry itself. The Zafer style is built from dense fields of small motifs, circles, triangles, dots and lines, and these patterns have to do two jobs at once. They have to be beautiful on their own, and they have to obey the larger shapes of the scene they live inside. When the geometry goes wrong, it is usually because I have let a pattern grow in a way that ignores the composition. The eye gets distracted. The harmony breaks. A field of motifs that should carry you gently across the canvas instead stops you in the wrong place.

These are subtle mistakes than the colour ones, harder to spot, but just as important. A painting can have perfect colours and still feel wrong because the underlying geometry is not working properly. Learning to feel mistakes has been one of the lessons of this whole journey.

The risk I chose to take

The most interesting mistakes are the ones I now invite on purpose. From 2023 to 2025, I painted my subjects against a red background. The red gave the work warmth, made the overpainting brighter, and served me well. But in 2025, I decided to replace it with something far more demanding. Now I build a complex geometrical background first, a dense and intricate field, and then I paint the scene on top of it.

Background for Pirogues in Rodrigues

I will be honest about what this costs me. These backgrounds are unpredictable. I cannot fully control how they will interact with everything I place over them, and they add an enormous amount of complexity to a process that was already full of risk. In every painting, the background fights the subject when the two refuse to settle. I feel like the United Nations is trying to resolve a conflict between warring nations! Most of the time, I have to rework the painting far more than I would have with the simple red field. By every practical measure, I have made my own life harder. "Donn baton pou bate*" would be the Creole expression for this. (*I provided the stick with which I was beaten)

A scene painted over one of these complex backgrounds has a richness that the red field could never give me. The painting feels as though it has layers beneath its surface, as though something is happening below the visible image. I could not have arrived at this if I had been unwilling to invite the trials and errors. The reward lives inside the very unpredictability that makes the work go wrong more often. The mistake and the reward come from the same source.

Every mistake is a teaching moment

Students often ask me how I deal with mistakes. Do not be afraid of making mistakes. I understand the fear. A mistake feels like proof that you are not good enough, that you have wasted material and time, that a real artist would not have made it. I have felt all of this. But it is the wrong way to see what is actually happening.

Every mistake I have made has taught me something I now carry into the next painting. The colour that fought its neighbour taught me which colours can stand together and which cannot. The shape that broke the rhythm taught me how patterns must serve the composition. The background that refused to cooperate taught me how to build depth I did not know I could reach. None of these lessons came from the paintings that went smoothly. They came from the ones that went wrong, and from my willingness to stay with the problem instead of abandoning the canvas.

After twenty years, I no longer hope for the painting that will not give me trouble, because that painting does not exist, and, more importantly, I would not want it. A painting that never goes wrong is a painting that never asks anything of me, and a painting that asks nothing of its maker has very little to give in return.

So when a canvas turns against me now, I try to meet it with something close to gratitude (after a moment of obvious frustration and sulking). The trouble is not a sign that I have lost my way. It is the painting telling me where it needs to go. My whole craft, the entire Zafer style as it stands today, was built from moments exactly like this one: the moment of going wrong and choosing to learn from it rather than fear it.

That, in the end, is what years of painting have actually taught me. Not how to avoid mistakes, but how to welcome them. The brush will slip. The colours will clash. The background will surprise you. Stay with it. "Manz ar li"!

Somewhere inside that mistake is the next thing you need to try.