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Why oh why do I paint.
Why do I create.
I don’t feel like the life I’ve stumbled into is one that I particularly chose. I’m not entirely sure how I made the decisions I did. Why on earth would I want to be a painter? No one ever thanks you for being a painter. People thank doctors and teachers and lawyers (some lawyers….). People even thank garbage men for providing the valuable service of allowing us to live civilised lives away from our waste. Some people do give thanks for the great painters of history, thank you Leonardo and thank you Picasso. But those are romantic heroes, not real people. Sure they were real people at one point but we don’t thank them, we thank their legends. They’re better than us mere mortals so of course we aren’t in museums and books, how could we be? No one walks up to their neighbour who paints in his kitchen on weekends and says “thank you for being an artist. I appreciate it.” And I’m not saying anyone should, truth is your neighbour probably sucks. All I’m saying is that I clearly didn’t get into the whole painting gig for the good of humanity. Wow, that was a long segue.
What I’m getting at is that obviously I didn’t do this for anyone else because no one else cares. And the thought that I will probably spend the rest of my life doing something that no else one cares about is sort of… scary. It wounds my ego. So if my ego is going to be wounded, I sure as hell better do something that I care about. So why the heck do I care about painting.
People see artists as these possessed beings who are channelling some sort of otherworldly spirit into our material world. I’ve heard artists describe art as something they just can’t help, it’s something that they just have to do. Any time an artist is portrayed in any kind of popular culture it’s made to seem as though art just spills out of them in this incredibly painful and self-destructive process. The whole “tortured artist” cliché. Painting is not my compulsion. I don’t really get uncontrollable urges to paint, it’s not something I need to do. Truth is, it’s more like work. Work I often don’t feel like doing and, at times, hate doing. There’s no demon inside of me trying to get out. There’s a desk, and a chair. I sit in the chair, at the desk, and I work. And I get angry and discouraged and I feel like a worthless piece of shit sometimes. I feel like I have wasted my time and a whole lot of money on learning a useless skill.
Except.
Except sometimes, sometimes I finish painting and it worked. Everything worked. I exceeded my expectations and I made something I am proud of. And then I feel like a god. Some sort of painting god. I feel like my brain sputtered and moaned its way into what it was meant to be. The one and only thing my brain can be useful. It is one of the only times that I feel like a real person, like something that is actively a living being that is worth being alive and not just the sum of a collection of daily tasks. Worldly pleasures and friends make me happy but this is different. I feel like something that has taken the great gift of life and has, for just an hour or so, enjoyed it to its fullest.
So yeah. That’s why I’m still doing this. Because about once a month I feel like I know what life is all about. Every other time I paint it feels like work, work I don’t get thanked for and don’t get paid for. And I used to think that because I didn’t rush to the studio my every spare hour to create in a fit of passion it meant I wasn’t a real artist. And I still might not be but I’m okay with that. I don’t paint because I want to be an artist I paint because I it makes me feel like I’m a real person.
So when I had an opportunity to paint stuff that someone might buy some day and I might have to compromise my “artistic integrity” I had a moment of hesitation. That’s not what an artist does. Then I reminded myself: you aren’t trying to be an artist, you just want to paint. I’m not trying to put my name in books or have my shows written about in art reviews. Someone handed me lemons so I’ll just make some goddamn lemonade. I freakin’ love lemonade.