Paint & Words: That Path

What I’m always painting is my inability to paint. I’m always drawing on my inability to draw. When I try to paint real things, what’s called in the business “painting from life,” I get stuck in a dream of real things. Impossible skin, protective water, the ethics in the planes of a face.

Better artists tend to paint their abilities. This honors the world outside, as well as the painter's own gifted or hard-won skills. Skilled work is always highly valued in this world, and justifiably so, but it also tends to devalue inconsistency. Like the beautiful, palpable mistake of a yellow-white square that indicates the sky.

There’s a current of acquired clumsiness in academy-trained artists that’s a corollary here, faux-naiveté in the service of The Next Big Thing. You see it all over the art magazines, but only the career-obsessed would hide their abilities under a brightly painted rock.

To paint honestly is to work with what you have and what you don’t. I want to go farther along that path, even when I use the same bad judgment as everyone else.

The process of taking the world in and out of sequence is the only ritual I know.