Struggle and Painting

I think as an artist there is always the underlying fear that you will never move beyond the mediocre, the bland, and the entirely un-original. You might as well not create if this is the case, or some I’m told.

The trouble being I don’t know who is telling me this, because as you probably have noticed from other posts I do believe ‘the world always needs another mediocre painting’. If for nothing else but the positive effect it has on the artist alone, producing and creating the work.

I think of a time, I was at a car boot sale, and at this particular section of the car park there is an area which I find for some strange reason really, really distasteful, and into which I don’t venture to often.

It’s a huddle of little hut like ‘shops’ packed high with old bits and pieces, odds and ends of various shapes and sizes. Normally, the proprietors are old men, sitting in some darkened corners, whom you don’t notice until you pick up something to examine it, and you hear a movement in the far corner. Its always dark and musty in these places, even in the summer, with boxes of old toilet seats stuffed under a make shift table..you get the picture. It was hear I made a discovery.

Beside one of these toilet seat boxes, I saw peeping out, the corner of an old painting. I pulled it out and it was an oil painting of a landscape, amateurish but good, passable, betraying a lot of talent. An illegible name neatly in the corner, it was in a thin wooden frame. I held the painting for some moments, and I felt myself growing quite sad in the muffled silence of the stuffy interior. Sad not for the artist, but for me, and the thoughts of my work eventually ending up here, in this place, in this box. Dreams tied up in baler twine beside a box of toilet seats.

So sometimes when I’m struggling I think of that old painting in that car boot-sale and it doesn’t help me. So I try not to think about it.