Thoughts on Painting

Happy New Year, fellow Painters! I hope you had a nice relaxing couple of weeks of down time over the holidays. It’s always a nice time to recharge my batteries and enjoy so much eating and drinking and merriment with my family. This year seemed particularly enchanting as my grandson is almost 3 and my granddaughter is almost 1.

It’s a magical age for little ones and Christmas. I loved seeing the wonderment in Mason’s eyes over just about everything. “The lights are so pretty, Grandma!” everywhere we went would come out of his little mouth. It makes an adult look with new eyes at everything, even an artist. It’s a view from a child’s eyes that seems to get lost as an adult in the humdrum of every day life of bill paying and responsibilities. It’s a view that I struggle to maintain: one of pure wonder and adoration and awe over the simplicity of a house covered with lights, a light snowfall, or seeing Santa at the mall and having him give you a candy cane when you’re done pouring out your heart about what special thing you’d like for Christmas. The wonder, for me, when I was young and we got to stay up until midnight to go to the candlelight service at the Episcopal Church in Almaden. The beauty of the light and smell of the candles still makes me teary as an adult. And the excitement of staying up so late was unparalleled. Getting to do that and come home to go straight to bed, without having to stay awake for several more hours stuffing stockings and putting toys together is something that is not fully appreciated until adulthood. And while I thoroughly appreciate and love parenthood and my (grown now) kids, the holidays now are a different kind of feeling. More melancholy and less uncontainable excitement at the holidays for sure. Still magical at times, but different.

To maintain this appreciation for these things can sometimes take work as an adult. I am not great at compartmentalizing things that bother me and they can leak into my otherwise happy day. There are always bills to pay, always doctor’s appointments to be made, grocery stores to go to, and piles of laundry to do. There are always people who will say or do mean things, some days outnumbering people saying or doing nice things. My goal for the new decade is to enjoy simple things, without letting the ugly things that happen in life disrupt beautiful moments. This is not an easy goal. It’s right up there with in difficulty with weight loss, quitting some bad habit, or getting healthy. Maintaining appreciation for life’s small pleasures takes work and focus if you’ve gotten into the habit of not doing that. That’s why there are aisles and aisles of books trying to teach humanity how to do this. Because it’s not easy. But it’s an essential skill as an artist. And one that, for few, comes naturally.

It’s really the artist’s job every day, to look at something, perhaps something mundane, and make it something worth value, worth taking another look at through fresh eyes. It is an artist’s job to create something others want to gaze upon with awe and appreciation. It is not an easy thing to do. It’s kind of like assuming the role of my grandchild. Pointing out that on this gray, overcast day with potholes everywhere in the road, that there are things that are casting light and beauty that one might drive right by without the adorable narrator in the backseat. The artist needs to become that adorable narrator. Sometimes the narrator screams in delight, sometimes it’s just a whisper of awe. I think a good painting is the embodiment of this childlike perspective. It brings the viewer to a different place, away from their everyday woes. It reminds us in the dead of winter that somewhere else it is somebody’s summer.

So, here’s to 2020!  May it bring new focus and perspective and paintings that help viewers reconnect with a place of awe and wonderment long forgotten.

Keep those brushes to the canvas!

Chris