Painting

I want to paint again. I enjoy it, I really do, but it's just so difficult to find the time to devote to it, with everything else that goes on at any given moment.

I tried painting because I wanted to free myself from the tyranny of the pen. I should explain ― when I was younger, so many years ago, I used to draw. I had a fountain pen with a refillable reservoir that I loved (I'm sure I still have it, somewhere), with a wonderful, fluid quality of line. I felt completely at ease with it. And I felt, not coincidentally, in complete control of it. I would experiment with a brush and ink from time to time, but it never felt as comfortable (and I'd end up with not much more the same sort of line, only applied with a brush). So I kept using that pen.

As time wore on, though, drawing somehow became a constant struggle for control over my work. Everything had to be just so, just right, and a process that should have been organic came to be mechanical. (And it certainly wasn't as much fun.) I gave it up, and drifted toward Graphic Design, which seemed better suited to me ― I could exercise the same creativity, but perhaps there was less ambiguity.

But I wanted to go back, to try again to use a brush, to give in to that lack of control. I'm finding it to be very liberating. I don't have any structured ideas about what I want to achieve, so it becomes an exercise in wandering down a long path with no real destination ― with luck, you just know when you get there.

I had a friend who liked to paint ― she was the person who inspired me to try. (I have discovered, long after our friendship ended, that she had apparently been, in fact, a girlfriend ― but I must have missed that at the time, and anyway, that's a story better told another day.) Her color palette was drab and dull, and her technique seemed to be to thrash about at a canvas with any paint and tools at hand with the hope that something, anything might come of it, a technique I could certainly appreciate ― though nothing ever did seem to come of it. That said, though, I wanted to be supportive. I tried to be supportive. But I was never all that enthusiastic about her paintings, and she took that quite to heart. She would wield that criticism like a weapon when she was insecure about her work (which was, inevitably, always), and use that as the excuse when insecurity consumed any creativity.

Then again, her work always seemed much more about labor than creativity. There was an element of dissociation, a quality of cold. Strip away the endless layers of paint with the hope of discovering an emotion or truth, only to find it never was.

I want to paint again, even if only for myself, to discover aspects of my personality that remain largely unexplored. Perhaps I'll find them within the work.