You'll Never Paint Another One
"The artist is a receptacle for emotions that come from all over the place: from the sky, from the earth, from a scrap of paper, from a passing shape, from a spider's web." -Pablo Picasso
Sometimes, artists are reluctant to let go of a favorite original. In a group of artists, I once overheard a long-time artist advise another reluctant one to always sell their work. She said, “You can always paint another one.”
I pondered this advice because intuitively, it didn’t “feel” right to me. There was a reason why this advice was bad. But I was in the middle of being in charge of an art event and had immediate practical concerns to handle. Thinking it through would have to wait.
I did eventually work out what bothered me about the well-meaning artist’s advice to another, from my own perspective, and brought out the launching point for my views in my first novel in the Painter Place series. To lay the groundwork for my point, the section from the first book, Painter Place, follows. To set the stage, Caroline Painter is a young artist and her uncle’s long-time student in a family in which only the artist of each generation inherits the major part of the small island they’ve lived on in South Carolina for over three hundred years. In this scene, she is in the English harbor town of Mevagissey to help her uncle with filming an art video in 1985. Only a week before, she had experienced a painful life change, which opened her emotions to try something bold and different in working out her anger and acceptance of rejection.
Painter Place
“Most of you here know that an original painting is an interaction with an artist. At any given time on any given day, the same subject matter by the same artist will be portrayed differently according to moods and other influences. Sometimes, we paint a scene simply to share it and get people to look closer. Other times, we are working out something inside of ourselves, the way people might talk things through to see more clearly. And at other times, the subject has special significance on a personal level.”
Caroline paused, organizing her thoughts. “One of the terrific things about painting in acrylics is that they are dry enough to handle right after completion. I’ve painted three canvases in the past three days. Two were plein air views of the sea cliffs around Mevagissey, done as experimental compositions. They fall into the category I mentioned about working things out as if we are talking them through, trying to understand them better. Imagine my surprise when the first one sold from the balcony of my room here on the night I painted it. The other one is titled Sea Cliffs and was done for filming here in the harbor yesterday.”
She turned as Wyeth pulled the cover from the painting and the guests showed their appreciation. Facing them again, Caroline hesitated. The guests waited on her expectantly. She inhaled and smiled.
“The painting I’m about to show you was painted today. It’s an example of an artist choosing a subject for its special significance on a personal level, though it did involve working through some things as the former paintings did. It’s full of memories of a girl who likes the sunflowers that grow at her home, and a boy who likes tall ships and is fascinated at how to get all of that adventure into a bottle. Someone here tonight sent me sunflowers yesterday because they’re my favorite flowers and he knew I’d be facing a challenging day. He knew how to show me he understands because he grew up watching me. I daresay he knows things about me that I don’t know yet myself.”
By now, most of my fellow artists will have guessed the point I’m going to make. You’ll never be the same person when you “paint another one.” In fact, if you painted the original with a passion that you worked out, nothing of it remains inside of you to do another. You may trace over the same outlines of the original and transfer them to another surface, you may study a photo of the original image and try to copy it, but frankly, if you do, you’re missing the point of painting in the first place. You should be pouring your feelings about the subject into the painting, and you’ll never feel the same about it as you did the day it first moved you. You should be a better artist than you were for the original, because it was a road you traveled toward honing your skills. You learned things as you worked it out.
Don’t get me wrong. Your second effort might/should actually be a better painting in terms of skill. But it will never “feel” like the day you experienced the first one.
Sometimes, artists are reluctant to let go of a favorite original. In a group of artists, I once overheard a long-time artist advise another reluctant one to always sell their work. She said, “You can always paint another one.”
I pondered this advice because intuitively, it didn’t “feel” right to me. There was a reason why this advice was bad. But I was in the middle of being in charge of an art event and had immediate practical concerns to handle. Thinking it through would have to wait.
I did eventually work out what bothered me about the well-meaning artist’s advice to another, from my own perspective, and brought out the launching point for my views in my first novel in the Painter Place series. To lay the groundwork for my point, the section from the first book, Painter Place, follows. To set the stage, Caroline Painter is a young artist and her uncle’s long-time student in a family in which only the artist of each generation inherits the major part of the small island they’ve lived on in South Carolina for over three hundred years. In this scene, she is in the English harbor town of Mevagissey to help her uncle with filming an art video in 1985. Only a week before, she had experienced a painful life change, which opened her emotions to try something bold and different in working out her anger and acceptance of rejection.
Painter Place
“Most of you here know that an original painting is an interaction with an artist. At any given time on any given day, the same subject matter by the same artist will be portrayed differently according to moods and other influences. Sometimes, we paint a scene simply to share it and get people to look closer. Other times, we are working out something inside of ourselves, the way people might talk things through to see more clearly. And at other times, the subject has special significance on a personal level.”
Caroline paused, organizing her thoughts. “One of the terrific things about painting in acrylics is that they are dry enough to handle right after completion. I’ve painted three canvases in the past three days. Two were plein air views of the sea cliffs around Mevagissey, done as experimental compositions. They fall into the category I mentioned about working things out as if we are talking them through, trying to understand them better. Imagine my surprise when the first one sold from the balcony of my room here on the night I painted it. The other one is titled Sea Cliffs and was done for filming here in the harbor yesterday.”
She turned as Wyeth pulled the cover from the painting and the guests showed their appreciation. Facing them again, Caroline hesitated. The guests waited on her expectantly. She inhaled and smiled.
“The painting I’m about to show you was painted today. It’s an example of an artist choosing a subject for its special significance on a personal level, though it did involve working through some things as the former paintings did. It’s full of memories of a girl who likes the sunflowers that grow at her home, and a boy who likes tall ships and is fascinated at how to get all of that adventure into a bottle. Someone here tonight sent me sunflowers yesterday because they’re my favorite flowers and he knew I’d be facing a challenging day. He knew how to show me he understands because he grew up watching me. I daresay he knows things about me that I don’t know yet myself.”
By now, most of my fellow artists will have guessed the point I’m going to make. You’ll never be the same person when you “paint another one.” In fact, if you painted the original with a passion that you worked out, nothing of it remains inside of you to do another. You may trace over the same outlines of the original and transfer them to another surface, you may study a photo of the original image and try to copy it, but frankly, if you do, you’re missing the point of painting in the first place. You should be pouring your feelings about the subject into the painting, and you’ll never feel the same about it as you did the day it first moved you. You should be a better artist than you were for the original, because it was a road you traveled toward honing your skills. You learned things as you worked it out.
Don’t get me wrong. Your second effort might/should actually be a better painting in terms of skill. But it will never “feel” like the day you experienced the first one.
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