Why Painting?

One question I like to ask myself is, why painting? I know that seems like an odd question, and a general one, but it really does keep me on my toes.

In our current world, we have access to so many ways to render an image. So in a time where video is king and photography is fast and accessible, why would a person dedicate their career to a medium that is time-consuming and limited to a flat, two-dimensional still image? 

Compared to the capacities of Photoshop and Procreate, painting seems antiquated. Once upon a time, before the advent of photography and the like, painting served a much more practical purpose; as the preeminent form of visual documentation, painting was as much a utility for posterity as it was an art form. Photography has long since eliminated that need, and yet so many of us still feel the need to pick up a brush. I’ve found myself pondering this many times over the years, and I’ve landed on four reasons why I paint and why I believe it remains a critical medium today.

1. The History

In art school I was taught that when you create art, the decisions you make echo back to the work of previous artists within the same medium. For example, if I paint a still life, I am tapping into the language of Wayne Theibaud, and Cézanne before that, and eventually all the way to the rich, visual language of vanitas painters of 17th century Europe. When I paint a skull or decaying fruit, I’m speaking to a past, present and future audience. Maybe it’s just because I’m a bit of a history nerd, but I think it’s really cool that I can build on a tradition that started centuries ago and communicate modern concepts with a visual language tied together by this medium. 

When I think about what I want my art to say, I’m really grateful that painting has such a rich history stretching back to Western Europe because when I address issues of classism, patriarchy and anti-colonialism in my work, I know that I am using a shared language with the artists from that formative era. I am obviously not speaking directly to those people, but by using their visual motifs, themes and even their styles, I can continue the conversations they started with a modern audience.

2. The Skill

First let me say that I know that skill is a loaded topic to bring up when it comes to art. Certainly I am a believer, as are many others, that you don’t need skill to make good art. One does not need excellent drawing skills to be a good painter, and so on and so on. I am thankful for the artists who came before who said that art is art when a creative mind says so. I think that has liberated us and made art more accessible.

But as with all good things, I believe that a thought process can go too far. In this case that is the idea that possessing a skill and showing it in one’s art is, to borrow a modern term, cheugy. Whether it’s the continued impact of the 20th century abstract expressionist painters and their rejection of realism, or something else, I’m not sure, but the art world can tend to treat work that is skillfully created as though it is conceptually diminished because of that skill. The elevation of deskilled art has certainly come at the expense of skilled art as the ambiguity of a taped banana being labeled high art would suggest. This is where I push back.

Sentiments expressed in the art world are often echoes from the real world, and I would hypothesize that this disdain for skill has roots in elitist and classist society. For example, it is objectively true that plumbers, electricians, hair stylists and nail technicians (to name a few) practice trades that require immense skill. But in a capitalist society, the social position attached to that work diminishes the reputation of the skill despite its value. 

Similarly, there’s an idea that having skill is what separates art from craft. I see this exemplified in the patriarchy, where a distinction between “good” female artists and “good” male artists is sometimes made where women are praised for their skill in something like stitching or quilt-making that requires a lot of technical ability but aren’t nearly as likely to be credited for their intellectual prowess compared to men. Just look at any best selling artists list.

I am the daughter of a long line of working class laborers and it’s because of that, among other reasons, that it is important to me to utilize skill in my work. That owes to the themes of class consciousness in my art because, although many of my ideas can be proven with photography, weaving myself back into my art work with a free hand technique established long ago puts me in touch with both my class and the artists and laborers who practiced before me.

3. The Process

I love the process of painting. 

I love picking out the blobs of color and I love that color theory is the anchor that all of my decisions ultimately answer to. I also love drawing. The magic of taking an image from your head and putting it down on paper is a process with which I’ve always been fascinated. Painting combines two of my favorite activities in the world into one and the process matters to me just as much as the end product.

Something about how my brain is wired relishes that part of the process which other artists may feel holds them back. A valid critique of painting I’ve heard artists make is that the medium is tedious; the process of creating a two-dimensional image that looks three-dimensional is too time-consuming when alternatives like collage, photography and digital art can be more effective and efficient in communicating a message. I get that. But for me, this is an arduous step that I embrace.

I can spend a whole day painting a lawn, focusing on the individual blades of grass and how the light and shadow play off of them, and to me it is not time wasted. Time in the weeds of painting is time well spent lol. I love how long it takes, and while I know that that is a detractor for some, I adhere to the idea that time is its own medium. (David Hockney talks a lot about this.) Especially if you’re painting from life, time adds a whole other dimension to painting which photography cannot. A photo captures a fraction of a second, whereas a painting can encompass an infinite amount of time based on how long it takes to complete. In that sense, time is an asset in my work that really excites me.

4. The Physicality

As children we are often sat down with a box of crayons and paper in front of us and an instinct to draw something captures our imagination. Even today, I still can’t resist scribbling with my finger on a foggy window like I did countless times as a kid. The urge to create is inherent in us practically from birth and part of what makes me feel alive is scratching that itch everyday.

It may sound cheesy, but having a shared practice with my child self is incredibly powerful. The same magnetism I felt as a young girl for doodling I experience now when I put down draw lines on a painting. I can only describe it as irresistible. To me it’s as human as yawning or stretching, and it’s deeply cathartic.

In college my painting professor liked to say that drawing isn’t about an image, but instead about recording movement on a two-dimensional surface. That always stuck with me because even if you end up with a cohesive image on your canvas, at the end of the day you are putting down movements with scratches, marks, lines and wiggles that show you were there. The urge to do that is very primal.

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It’s a closely held belief of mine that everyone is creative in some capacity, but I certainly don’t think that every medium is for everyone. Perhaps none of my reasons for choosing painting resonate with you, and that’s okay because I think the world is better served with artists using all different types of mediums. Because of how long painting has been around, it gets slapped with a “classical” medium label that falsely attempts to put it atop a creative hierarchy. I don’t believe in such a thing, and if pushing and pulling pigment on a canvas limits your message, by all means find another medium that better suits you.

Like I said at the top, I’ve made a concerted effort in my career to ask myself, why painting? I encourage you to do the same. Maybe the answers to that question lead you to a different medium, or maybe, like me, you can find in those answers a more purposeful and intimate relationship with painting.