Giving in to painting

Trying to give up painting is one of my many failures. Writing this is the formal admission of defeat – my signature on the unconditional surrender document.

Renouncing painting meant avoiding seeing other works of art and thoughts about it. Doing something else. Take a stab at spectating. Then, I see a slab of morning light on a bare wall. Or leaf shadows splattered on cement, and I’m doomed.

Eventually, there’s always the point when I throw paint on paper, and the old flicker ignites.

Painting remains a mysterious process.

You rub leftover kids’ oil pastels onto cheap paper. Then smear in the remaining paint you got. All you got is a faint flickering feel of what’s right.

When it “works,” the thing snaps to gather. The experience is pure magic. You are left in awe, along with the whispered thought of, “where did this thing come from? ”

When it’s not working, you “know” instantly.

The sensation is identical of making a typo or a spelling error. Unlike writing, it’s not a case of a backspacing fix. The feeble light in the head has no hint of direction.

All I can do is toil in the dimness. Sometimes, there’s the damming defeating realisation of reaching the end of the road. There is no magic, no awe.

I’ve learned to accept these moments. It’s a matter of swallowing pride, ditching hours of fumbling and starting anew. Flailing about with more paint is futile (I learned that the hard way). Often its the case of ditching the whole thing in a bin several times.

I’ve long treated the pull of painting as an aliment. A shame I felt compelled to hide. Early this year, I reached a stage where I no longer felt ashamed of painting. It’s what I do. Some people go running. Others play instruments. A safe, inaccurate word is “hobby”. I avoid spending money on it. My canvases are old t-shirts or abandoned kids’ drawing books.

A reason for my shame is that I cannot “explain” what the paint on paper “mean”. I am incapable of adding insight on what I paint through words. Another is my aversion to call what I do “art” and the theatre of being an “artist”.

I have too many cringing experiences of people who use the title. I see it as easy justification for pretentious behaviour and reverence for tedious work through streams of art speak. I’ve had the same cringe reading art criticism “analysis” of Rothko, Kline, Hopper, Mondrian or Pollack.

So using similar language to talk about my paintings becomes shameful- a deception worse than lying. I get a physiological tightening inside my chest when anyone tries. My verbal motor skills sputter. At best, I manage an unintelligible mumble before cutting to silence.

The escape I’ve come to use is to describe my paintings as smears of mental excrement. The result of processing inputs from the function of being alive in this world. The technique works in two ways.

Within me, I know inexplicably that it’s the truth.
The “explanation” kills annoying questions.

Despite this I have attempted using the peephole of art criticism on what I produce.

There are apparent themes from the shapes on the paper. Recurrences of certain shapes. Where the horizon line is on the paper. The familiar angles of the light, direction of shadows and colours (could be me trying to nurse cheap paint for as long as possible).

AI and machine learning will pick up other patterns. Yet these are superficial. Any conclusions from them are flat as early Chat GPT hallucinations.

I’ve spent (wasted?) enough time looking at what I’ve put on paper, trying to find a “meaning”. They look back at me blankly and mystified. The sensations I’ve gotten consistently are, “Why are you wasting your time looking at us?”. “Shut up your chattering mind and look at your own thoughts”.

Both are hard responses. We, lazy humans, prefer to look at the mysterious, hoping our patience will be rewarded by an “aha” moment of enlightenment.

That’s not how it works.

Understanding takes effortful lonely work. Watching cricket is easier than the endless, tiring hours mastering the consistent deliver of a killer spin under pressure.

If my paintings are outputs of digested thoughts, then I need to examine them closer. That calls for quietening the jumping, chattering mind, which, from previous experience, is one of the hardest things to do.