Sometimes You Just Have to Start

I have been struggling to paint.

There, I said it. Not exactly the kind of confession you expect from someone who has spent a good portion of his life making things, but lately I have been having a hard time getting myself into the studio. I have had some personal things going on that have occupied a fair amount of space in my head, and somewhere along the way painting just seemed to fall off the list. I would walk into the studio, look around, think about what I might want to paint, and then find some other perfectly reasonable thing that needed to be done. You know, important things. Things that suddenly become extremely important when you are trying to avoid doing the thing you actually want to do.

I thought I needed an idea. That seemed reasonable enough. Surely the problem was that I didn't have anything worth painting. So I started looking. I thought about subjects, compositions, colors, photographs, paintings I had seen, paintings I had made, and all the other things we creative people do when we are trying very hard to convince ourselves that thinking about making something is somehow the same thing as making something. The longer I looked for the right idea, the more impossible it seemed to find one.

Then I finally decided I was done with myself. I asked two friends if they would model for me. They both said yes, almost immediately, which was encouraging because apparently I was the only person in this whole equation making things difficult. I photographed their portraits without really knowing what I was going to do with them. I had no great revelation, no carefully developed concept, no little voice in my head telling me exactly how this was all going to turn out. I just had some photographs and a vague sense that there might be something in them.

So I started tinkering. I moved things around. I looked at the photographs. I tried a few things and didn't particularly like them. I thought about it some more. Then I did what I probably should have done in the first place. I prepared the canvases, toned them, laid out the materials, and basically drew a line in the sand.

I'm going to start. I didn't know what I was going to paint. I didn't know where it was going. I didn't know what the finished paintings would look like, and honestly, I had no idea if they were going to be any good. At that point, I decided that none of that mattered. I could figure out what the painting was after I had actually started painting it.

I've always loved that Chuck Close quote, “Inspiration is for amateurs. The rest of us just show up and get to work.” There is something wonderfully blunt about it. It takes the romance out of the process and replaces it with something much more practical. Show up. Do the work. See what happens.

But I think I finally understand something about that idea that I hadn't really considered before. Sometimes the work is what brings the inspiration. Once I started painting, things began to happen. A shape suggested another shape. A color relationship appeared that I hadn't anticipated. Something happened on the canvas that wasn't part of the original plan, and instead of trying to correct it, I started wondering where it might lead. The painting began to push back. It gave me something to respond to. And suddenly I wasn't trying to figure out what to paint anymore.

I was painting.

Then, seemingly out of nowhere, inspiration showed up. And when it did, it didn't exactly knock politely on the door. It came through like a freight train.

Now I can't stop thinking about the studio. When I'm away from it, I'm thinking about getting back into it. I've started setting aside time specifically to paint, and when something gets in the way of that time, I find myself getting a little irritated because there is a painting sitting in there that I want to get back to. It is an entirely different feeling from the one I had a few weeks ago when I couldn't seem to find the motivation to begin.

Which has me thinking about how often we get this backward. We wait to feel inspired before we act. We wait for the idea, the motivation, the right circumstances, the perfect moment. We think the sequence is supposed to be inspiration, then motivation, then action. But maybe it doesn't always work that way. Maybe sometimes you have to act first. Maybe you have to put something on the canvas before you know what it is supposed to become.

I think this gets harder the longer you do this. Experience is a wonderful thing, but it comes with baggage. You know what good work looks like. You know what your own work looks like when it is working. You know when something isn't working, and you have enough experience to imagine all of the ways things could go wrong before you even begin. A blank canvas can start to feel like a judgment rather than an invitation.

Maybe it doesn't have to be. Maybe we just need to give ourselves permission to make something that doesn't have to be great. Make the drawing. Take the photograph. Open the Illustrator file. Mix the paint. Put something on the canvas. Let it be awkward. Let it be unfinished. Let it surprise you. Let it become whatever it needs to become.

Because once it exists, you have something to work with. And that, I think, is the part I had forgotten. You don't always have to know where you're going before you move. Sometimes moving is how you figure out where you're going. I'm still not sure what these paintings are going to become. I don't really know if they will turn into something I am proud of or something I eventually paint over. And for once, I'm perfectly comfortable with that uncertainty.

Because I'm painting again. And right now, that feels pretty damn good.