My plan for this year is to learn to paint. Why in this digital age would I want to mess with icky sticky toxic paint? The age of the rock star painter has long past. But still I want to, and I've been thinking about why.
Painting is hard to get right. It is taking this world and seeing it, knowing it, recreating it. It is understanding a material and adding that skill as an arm to the creative mind. There is something about hands on experience I can’t get over. I haven’t mastered it and the frustration is compelling. If I keep messing with this stuff maybe it will become second nature, I reason. I want to make something beautiful.
Of course it is about the mind, an activity to keep it occupied and calm, to give it nice problems to solve and ponder, to let it dream of the earth and atmosphere. The painting itself is the proof, the final output to summarize the experience. It is an excuse to be here, to be anywhere and just stand around figuring it all out.
No comments:
Post a Comment