Grayson Perry’s Art Club has a radical, essential message – your art doesn’t need to be good

Many of us need a modern-day Bob Ross in the shape of Grayson Perry, writes Lucy Jones, to help us reconnect with the child within who just wants to push paint around the page

Helping us reconnect with the children within: Grayson Perry in 2018 (Getty)

At some point over the years, I picked up a pernicious and life-limiting idea, and I wonder if you did too. It’s the belief that there is no point in making something unless it is good. Worse still, that there is no point even trying to do something creative unless it’s going to result in an impressive finished product. I’m terrible at drawing, so I never do it. Awful at playing the piano nowadays, so I rarely try. Dreadful at painting, so that’s a closed door. I’d sooner watch the television, as most of us do with our leisure time.

I compare this idea with the full-throttle creativity of my three-year-old daughter, who throws paint around with gleeful, unselfconscious abandon. There are no obstacles yet to her artistic expression; mine is an assault course of self-doubt.

But a few weeks ago, I felt the urge to paint for the first time in 20 years. I did a copy of an Etel Adnan painting with some old oils I found in a drawer. It isn’t objectively “good” in the slightest, but it was a revelatory experience. I loved doing it. It didn’t matter that it wasn’t any good. I’ve done a few more since.

The success of the new show from Grayson Perry, Channel 4’s Grayson’s Art Club, suggests we’re all hungering for more creativity in our lives, or at least permission to try. The aim of the series is to “unleash our collective creativity during lockdown”. Perry turns the camera back on the viewer with the challenge: have a go yourself. The first episode, which aired on Monday, focused on portraits, the “kind of art everyone can have a go at”.

I loved the small details: Joe Lycett’s drinks trolley; the extraordinary carved galleon in the Perrys’ art studio; therapist Philippa Perry’s astute psychological asides (“you have two relationships – the one you have in your head with me, and the one you have with me”). But from the off, it was clear the show had a serious intention, with Perry talking about how art can “help us understand not just ourselves but the times we live in”. Art was portrayed as not just as a form of escapism but a way to process and make sense of the world around us and, crucially, connect with other people.

Creativity is a defining trait of humans, but when we become adults, or older children, we tend to lose it. Perry laid bare the root of the problem towards the end of the first episode. Vulnerability. “I did feel quite vulnerable making that,” he said, as Philippa (and us viewers) swallowed back the tears. “We have to be open and be prepared to fail.”

Joe Lycett pushed the message home further. “We worry so much about the thing being excellent and the finished thing, and if we let all of that go, the stuff we’d get done...”

It was a refreshingly democratising sentiment. Although there was a “winner” at the end, it wasn’t about the binary “good” or “bad”. As Lycett said, he knows when a painting is going well if he starts laughing. “Make it as possible as you can,” said the British painter Chantal Joffe, recommending people use printer paper and a pencil. Another made a portrait of Perry out of noodles and soy sauce.

Of course, lots of people are creative in all sorts of ways, from coding to gardening, baking to telling stories to children, but I wonder if many of us need a modern-day Bob Ross in the shape of Grayson Perry to help us reconnect with the child within who just wants to push paint around the page. Process instead of product. It’s a radical suggestion, especially in our ultra-optimised late-capitalist times.

Perhaps in our techno-society, with all the boxsets and streaming services and ebooks at our fingertips (most of which do not remunerate artists fairly), we have neglected our own creativity. If we watch the entirety of Netflix, could we be missing out on the intrinsic human pleasure of making something ourselves?

While our hunter-gatherer ancestors spent the evening hours around a campfire, telling stories, making up songs, dancing, we huddle around the glow of our television sets. But Grayson’s Art Club might be just what some of us need to turn the telly off and pick up a paint brush. It communicates a simple message we might have forgotten: creativity is in us all – and it’s good for our minds and spirits.