It's Just a Painting

Painting is the only art that many people seem to think you can do with no training. No one presumes to pick up a violin and make sounds anyone wants to listen to. No one believes you can dance ballet or sing opera without training. I remember an art history professor who, in response to a student's comment about a Jackson Pollock painting that "anyone could do that," said, "Yes, but he's the one who did it."

On the other hand, mastery of the craft of painting alone  is by itself no guarantee of greatness. Art history is full of painters who display enormous skill but whose work somehow fails to move us. Yes, tastes, which differ from person to person, culture to culture, and age to age, play a big role in our estimations of quality. Even so, we all probably can name a painter whose work, though widely revered, leaves us unmoved.

Painting well is difficult, and competence, much less mastery, typically requires years rather than weeks or months. Someone once said that everyone has a thousand bad paintings in them, and the best thing is to get them painted as quickly as possible. Ideally, that means painting every day. In practice, that means painting at every opportunity. There are no shortcuts and only so much time.

Most artists paint because they must. I am no different. I don't entirely understand this irresistible urge to make images, but it feels a little like magic or alchemy. A painter begins with what is essentially a colored mud or slurry, and with a large measure of hard-won skill, a dash of luck, and a pinch of inspiration, may end up with an object of surpassing beauty, an object that has the power to move those who look upon it. One can never predict when such magic will happen, and when it happens to me, I am at a loss to explain how or why. But the feeling of completion and well-being is so intense at such times that I will continue to paint in the hope of experiencing it one more time. 

For me, the act of making a painting is far more valuable than the painting itself. That's why my favorite painting is always the one I'm working on. Not all artists share this feeling, but many do. As I tell my students, "Don't get too precious, it's just a painting. You can always do another." More to the point, you should!