Hiding in Painting

I’ve heard it said many a time by art marketing gurus that people don’t buy what you paint, they buy why you paint. I do take issue with that to a certain extent - it’s not quite that simple, but I do believe it has some truth to it.

So why do I paint? Well, it’s always been in me somewhere, I guess. I’ve always wanted to paint, but it’s taken half my life for me to believe I can. I’ve gone further into that elsewhere so I won’t explore it here.

But at the most conscious level, I paint because I love to daub paint on canvas, to tease shape and colour and form from tubes of pure colour. I love to render a scene that has caught my eye, to interpret and record and formalize what made me stop and look. My current style is realistic, and there’s an argument that says that’s not interpreting a scene, that’s just copying it (another topic for discussion there!). But I love the challenge of rendering it realistically, getting the shapes and colours right, capturing the light and shadow accurately using just brushes and paint. For, it may be realistic, but it’s still an interpretation and something I love to get lost in.

But are nice pictures of things I’ve seen what I really want to paint, or am I hiding my inner self? Am I avoiding what I really want to paint? I think it’s fair to say I want to do both - sometimes I just want to paint things I like the look of, but I know I also want to paint things that are only found when I dig a little deeper into myself. I’m reluctant because they are much more personal, of course, but also because they are difficult to paint. It’s relatively easy to paint from a photograph or a view because you can see exactly what you’re painting. But rendering what’s in my head is another matter. There’s only a couple of feet between my head and my hands, but sometimes it feels like a hundred miles. I thought I had a reasonably vivid, visual imagination, but I find it very difficult to draw or paint what’s in my noggin.

This is very common, of course, even among artists, and that’s why references are so often used. And why practise is so important. I guess I just have to keep going and keep trying and finally I might manage to tease these things out. But I have to persevere and not give up when my first few efforts are nowhere near what’s in my head. It’s all part of the ‘fun’ of being an artist. Or the artistic struggle if you like to look at things that way. Some people say that the only real art is what comes from these internal struggles and the effort to express what’s going on inside. While I don’t agree that this is always the case (I do think some people just like to look at, and buy, ‘nice’ art), I certainly believe that art should sometimes come from the ‘soul’ and be a manifestation of somebody’s deeper thoughts.

So what is it I’m hiding? Well, I’m not going to say that here, am I? Not yet anyway. Hopefully it will start coming out through the art, and maybe then I’ll start talking about it.