Embracing Imperfections
Updated: 6 days ago
How Wet Paint Reminds Us of the Beauty in Unfinished Work
By David Salariya
“Beware Wet Paint” is a useful warning for anyone tempted to pass judgement too quickly.
The phrase is associated with Marcel Duchamp, the French-born American artist whose work challenged assumptions about what art could be. It also provided the title of Alan Fletcher’s 1996 book, with the reminder that a work’s worth can take time to assess. [1, 2]
I also take it as a warning against condemning an idea too early, while it is still finding its form.
Beware Wet Paint: The Cover That Never Dried
Usually hand written, we all know the sign - on a railing or a door - the sign carries more authority than a court order and of course we’ve all been tempted to touch.
Alan Fletcher knew that better than anyone when he published his 266 page Beware Wet Paint with commentary by Jeremy Myerson. The cover is a master of British Graphic Design - three words, set in three rows, each letter a different colour and every colour dribbling down the cover.
Thirty years later it still looks as if you could smudge it with your thumb.
Marcel Duchamp, used the phrase as a warning about judgement - that it takes time, perhaps a generation, before anyone can say what a piece of work is really worth. Paint that is still wet has not dried, neither has its reputation.
On the surface the cover is doing two things - it’s a visual dripping pun - the words literally behaving like the thing they describe. Come back later, let it dry.
The artwork had a life before the book, beginning as a design for a cover of Domus, the Italian architecture and design magazine. Good ideas, like good paint, can take more than one coat.
Why it Still Works
So what makes this a great cover?
I’ll try, no image, no photograph, not a clever crop - it’s legible at any size - in a bookshop or a thumbnail on a phone - a joke to and of course - it does exactly what the title says.
The real reason the cover works is harder to work out - it looks ‘made’, not generated, made by hand - a sense of something happening - the paint is still moving and of course leaving the white space alone.
The Man Behind the Book Cover
Fletcher, born in Nairobi in 1931 came to England as a child. He studied at the Central School of Art and the Royal College of Art in London, and then at Yale, where his lecturers included Josef Albers and Paul Rand. It is difficult to imagine a better pair of influences - Albers, the great expert on colour, and Rand, the man who proved corporate
identity can be witty.
Look at that cover, Albers in the way the colours sit against each other. Rand in the confidence of the joke.
Back in London Fletcher perhaps could claim to invent the idea of Graphic Design as a profession. After Fletcher/Forbes/Gill in the 1960s, he co-founded Pentagram in 1972 a new kind of studio - a partnership of equals, each partner running their own work but sharing the business - fifty years later that model is still copied around the world.
Pentagram client list is a history of modern taste - Pirelli, Reuters, the Victoria and Albert Museum. The V&A logo, with its elegant missing stroke, has outlasted directors, governments and changing fashions.
In 1994 Fletcher became consultant art director at Phaidon, which makes Beware Wet Paint something of a family affair. He was designing his own story for the house whose look he was shaping.
Fletcher died in 2006 in the same year the Design Museum opened its retrospective of his work. The paint, as Duchamp would have predicted, has been drying ever since.
Here is a small challenge for anyone who makes books, try putting your new design for a cover next to Fletcher’s.
Ask yourself if it will look as fresh in thirty years? Ask if it says one thing, clearly, with a smile and ask whether it makes you want to reach out and touch it.
If the answer is yes, beware, you may have made something that never quite dries.
An unfinished drawing can look... well unfinished. A story may take several attempts to find its beginning. If we expect every stage to resemble the finished work, we may discard something before we have discovered what it could become.
Embracing Imperfections - The Value of Unfinished Work
Perfection can be an awkward companion in a studio. It encourages us to scrutinise every mark, sometimes before we have worked out what the drawing is trying to do. The fear of getting something wrong can make it difficult to begin, and even harder to experiment.
Yet unfinished, imperfect and rejected describe different things. Work may still be developing, or it may be complete and contain limitations. It may simply be unfamiliar to its first audience. A rejection, on its own, tells us very little about which of these applies.
Accepting imperfection leaves room for revision. It allows us to recognise what needs attention without deciding that the whole enterprise has failed. An unexpected mark or an awkward passage can suggest a direction we would never have found by getting everything right immediately.
There is beauty in that visible thinking: the tentative line, the adjustment, the possibility that has not yet been settled.
What Rejection Feels Like
Like everyone else, I have faced challenges dealing with rejection. It is especially tough when the work being judged feels closely connected to who we are.
Early in my career, I received a rejection letter from an editor at the long gone Edinburgh publishing house Oliver & Boyd. The editor had hand written two foolscap pages with cutting criticism of the sample illustrations I had been asked to do.
Two hand written pages give a rejection considerable space to make itself felt.
Criticism can be useful, but its usefulness is not always obvious when it arrives. It takes time to separate a practical observation about the work from the feeling that we have been dismissed altogether. I never understood why all the effort - when I wasn't going to get the job anyway.
Some criticism deserves attention. Other judgements reflect a difference in taste or expectations. Learning to distinguish between them is part of a creative life. We can reconsider a drawing or a manuscript without allowing one response to determine whether we should continue making anything at all.
Learning to Look Again
Art, engineering, publishing and music offer examples of work that challenged expectations. Their stories show why unfamiliarity, criticism and experimentation need to be considered on their own terms.
The Eiffel Tower
The Eiffel Tower was developed by engineers Maurice Koechlin and Émile Nouguier, with architect Stephen Sauvestre, and championed by Gustave Eiffel. Built for the 1889 Exposition Universelle, which marked the centenary of the French Revolution, it faced fierce criticism from people who considered its appearance an affront to Paris. [3]
Over time, it became one of the city’s most recognisable symbols. Who could now imagine Paris without it?
The tower is a useful reminder of how quickly an unfamiliar design can be dismissed. Its engineering required precision; the uncertainty lay in how people would respond to it. Early hostility did not settle its value.
Publishers and Rejection
Before the success of Harry Potter, J.K. Rowling’s first novel in the series was turned down by several publishers. Her own account describes the year her agent spent finding a publisher before Bloomsbury accepted it. [4]
A publisher’s rejection is not a dependable measure of a book’s eventual value. Nor does it prove that a manuscript is unfinished or that its author needs to surrender the qualities that make it distinctive.
For a writer receiving another refusal, that distinction matters. Rejection may prompt a useful reassessment, but it is not a complete verdict on what the work might mean to its eventual readers.
The Beatles in the Studio
With Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, the Beatles made the recording studio a place for experiment. Having stopped touring, they could explore sounds without needing to reproduce every detail on stage. George Martin and the engineers helped them find inventive ways to realise their ambitious ideas with the equipment available. [5]
The fictional band gave the album a theatrical frame. Its production involved time, skill and a willingness to try things whose results could not be known in advance.
This is the useful connection with unfinished work. Experimentation involves making something, listening to it and deciding what to do next. Listening to the finished album, it is easy to overlook the uncertainty involved in making it.
Room for the Unexpected
Theatre offers another way of thinking about this. In improvisation, performers respond to one another as events unfold. An unexpected gesture or a moment of hesitation can become material for the next exchange.
That responsiveness requires attention and skill. It also requires enough confidence to continue when a performance takes an unforeseen turn. The audience can feel the immediacy of people listening and reacting to one another.
There is something here for writers, illustrators and designers too. We need to notice what is happening in the work as we make it. A plan can guide us while still leaving room for a discovery that changes it.
For performers, rejection can carry a particular sting because the person and the performance are so closely connected. I suspect that can make it especially difficult, though disappointment is hardly confined to the stage.
Rejection can feel intensely personal for performers.
Use the Machine - Don’t Be One
The appeal of speed and predictability is easy to understand. When a project feels uncertain, a tool that promises a quick result can seem very reassuring. Generative AI brings that promise into writing and image-making, raising questions about what we value in the process as well as in the result.
My concern is that we may become so impressed by an appearance of completion that we overlook the thinking that happens while something is being made.
Working through an idea changes our understanding of it. We notice a relationship, reject a solution, or discover that the part we thought was a mistake is worth pursuing. Those decisions help us develop judgement. They also allow the work to become something we could not fully describe at the beginning.
Creativity needs room for uncertainty. It can also benefit from discipline, routine and a quiet place to work. The point is to leave space for experiments whose value is not immediately obvious.
We can use tools while remaining responsible for our choices. The decision about what deserves to be kept, changed or abandoned is part of the work. So is the pleasure of discovering something through doing it.
An unfinished piece gives us an opportunity to stay with those decisions a little longer.
We've been here before - well The Ancient Greek Myths have...
...Ovid in Book 8 of the Metamorphoses tells of Erysichthon, who takes an axe to Demeter's sacred grove, seeing only timber where everyone else sees memory and meaning. Erysichthon's punishment is a hunger nothing can satisfy. He devours his fortune, then repeatedly sells his daughter, Mestra, who changes shape to escape each buyer - the proceeds returning to the father, never to her and when nothing else remains, he eats himself.
It is the oldest warning about this art fracking extraction: an appetite that cannot recognise the value of what it consumes ends by consuming itself. The prophecy has already been demonstrated in the lab: models trained on machine output degrade, the system autodigesting its own waste. Without human creatives these AI models enter a loop, digesting their own output. But the myth only tells the extractor how it ends; it says nothing about the years between, and the self-devouring may take a generation.
Nature has already run this experiment, In 1944, twenty-nine reindeer were introduced to predator-free St Matthew Island in the Bering Sea. By 1963 there were around 6,000. The herd stripped the slow-growing forage on which it depended and, when a brutal winter came, collapsed. Appetite does not need to be malicious to destroy its own pasture; it needs only to expand faster than the pasture can recover.
The Need for Approval
The difficulty comes when external approval becomes the only measure of whether our work matters. Fear of criticism can lead us to anticipate every possible objection, smoothing away the qualities that gave an idea its character.
As an author, designer and publisher of books for children, I know how closely work can be connected to identity. My books reflect my background, imagination and the ways I choose to explain or illustrate an idea. They carry decisions made over time, as well as the contributions of the people who worked on them.
That connection helps explain why judgement can feel so personal. It also explains why authorship and credit matter. A creator’s name connects the finished work to the person whose thought and labour helped bring it into being. Removing that connection can feel like an erasure of part of a life.
Accepting imperfection means allowing ourselves to develop while taking our work seriously. We need enough confidence to listen to criticism, and enough independence to decide what to do with it.
Let the Paint Dry
The temptation is to want certainty too soon: a perfect first attempt, an approving audience, a clear indication that the work will succeed.
Much of making happens before any of those things is available. A sketch offers a possibility. A draft allows an idea to be examined. We discover what needs changing by spending time with what is already there.
“Beware Wet Paint” asks for a little patience. Give the work time to develop, and give yourself time to see it clearly. Attend to the mistakes that need correcting. Keep an eye on the ones that lead somewhere interesting.
Before deciding that an idea has failed, allow it the chance to become itself.
About the Author
David Salariya is an author, artist, designer and publisher, and the founder of The Salariya Book Company. Its imprints, Book House, Scribo and Scribblers, published books for children across non-fiction, illustrated storytelling and activities. His work brings together drawing, design and an interest in how books encourage young readers to look, question and discover.
Sources and further reading
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