Why Paint?

Leo Tolstoy

This question has been tackled a great, great many times by better minds than I, and hopefully in the future it will be continued to be tackle because unfortunately there is no one-off simple answer. This is a question which ultimately, you and I, painters, artists, must answer for ourselves. Some manage to find a satisfactory answer which gives them peace for a time and enables them to continue working. For others, the answer is simply not good enough and they never lift a brush again. For others it takes their work in a totally different direction. So it’s a good question to ask, if only for integrity’s sake, and the likelihood is that this article will pose more questions than it answers.

So why do I paint? It’s a nice way to pass the time? No. It makes me happy and at peace? – Hmm…not really… (Can be very frustrating actually). To express your creative inner self ? That’s not a very satisfactory answer, its full of clichés and who the hell is the creative inner self when it’s at home? Is it a different person than who I am now as I write this. You could argue - Yes it is, that’s the whole point! And maybe you’d be right. We could tie ourselves up in word games, scoring points till we’ve backed the question into the corner and gone home. But we still have to get up the next morning and ask it again and again in the context of each new day, with all its joys and sorrows and find the reason to continue working at the easel.

Quiet simply; we paint, because we have to. Or to frame the question in other terms, a vocation is something we cannot not do, if you excuse the double negatives. It’s to these people that this site is primarily dedicated, the desperate many, who have no choice but to drag themselves back to the blank canvas and begin again. Sometimes after the passing celebrations of a successful work; but more often than not to begin again, a vision not yet attained.

Communication?
Painting is a compulsion. It arises from a need to express, to communicate, to show. What we communicate can be as varied as the people themselves, and as such, can be very subjective. Paradoxically, what is most subjective can be at times, be most universal, striking a chord with people we know little or nothing about. And therein lays the power of painting, and indeed all art.

Enough with the generalities, since the subject of painting and the reason for it is a very personal one, the only real value, that I can give is my own experience of why I paint. Perhaps my reasons, might resonate with you on some level, inspire or perhaps even motivate you further on your own journey.

I guess I paint, primarily to communicate. Painting, at its heart is primarily about communication. But who are we communicating to? It might not be necessarily others, it could be ourselves. It could even be a form of conversation with the Divine, whatever you envision that Deity to be. The cavemen and the wall paintings of Bison and hunting have led many experts to speculate as to the reason for their drawings. A form of visualizing a positive outcome, or more an act of remembrance of something good, which they wanted to hold unto. The drawings, a touchstone of the experience to which they would return.

It’s probably both, and its the same with me and you why we paint.. There may be different reasons at different times, but it is only human to question, so we must question our motivations, if only to understand them a little better, and in doing so understand ourselves.

The Way You Paint
It changes. As you change it changes, because its who you are, and that’s a good thing. It’s a sign of growth and development. It might not be construed in all circles as good however. Your work might stop selling; customers might dislike it and feel you’ve taken a turn for the worse. Galleries even drop you.

All this is very difficult, but really really irrelevant. If your brave enough to paint, you have to take the consequences and one of those is that your work can and will change direction and you have to go with it. Because it was that impetus that originally drew you to paint, and if you don’t follow where it leads you’ll loose the reason. Good Galleries will understand this, loyal customers will. If they don’t?...such is life. Keep moving forward.

There seems to be, broadly speaking two schools of thought when it comes to painting, and learning and teaching about painting. The first is the free expression movment, where anything you paint is valid, because it comes from you and its your expression and that’s enough to make it art. The other is the more traditional line of thought which says one must master the technical aspects of painting, before one can truly produce a work worthy of the name of art. Their argument would go along the lines of ‘you won’t expect a musician to start playing Bethohovens moonlight sonata without first have mastered the rudiments of their craft such as the scales.

I stand somewhere in the middle of this argument, and I think both parties are right to an extent. There is a need for both technical proficiency and also there is the need for freedom for the spirit to express itself as it wishes in your work. Theres room for both, and instead of being diagramitically opposed, they are in fact, opposites of the same coin, and are just different renderings of the same overall picture. (if you excuse the pun). I think as long as the individual is commited to their vocation of painting, these arguments will seen as the domain of critics who cannot and would not try to paint themselves, for the working artist, these musings are irrelevant and academic, because as they work they will find that at various times of their lives one will take precedence over the other, when in fact what is happening is that the artist is merely growing, the most natural thing in the world and what is meant to happen. The important thing is the keep putting the brush to the canvas.

Finding a Style
Many painters become hung up on finding ‘their style’ to the point of paralysis and this to a point is understandable. In some circles, we are actively encouraged to pursue a particular route, especially if the resulting paintings are selling, but It would be a mistake to allow sales to dictate how we ultimately work.

Style is a by product of good working habits and its something that will happen despite ourselves. Its something that we could not even deny, no more than our own hand writing. So never allow yourself the argument that you don’t paint because you don’t have a unique marketable style, just admit your lazy and leave it at that. Its more honest. Or else, just paint your way through the block to the other side and watch your work achieve a consistency that you never thought would be possible. That’s your main job as an artist. Just keep painting. You know you have to.