I'm a terrible painter (and why that's perfectly splendid)
Now and again, I like to paint. There's a drawer in my flat stuffed with art supplies, and sometimes—not too often and only when the mood strikes—I open it up, take out a pad of thick watercolour papers and a small box of paints, and spend an hour or so making very bad art. What I paint is seldom imaginative or exciting. Usually, I scroll through my phone and find a photo that feels pleasing—a pretty view, maybe, or a snap of a few friends on a night out—and try and render it, with little real commitment to fidelity, in paint.
My technique is, honestly, quite terrible. I have little idea of how to apply watercolours correctly, and so I usually end up laying on the paint much too thickly, treating it more like an acrylic than the misty, diaphanous liquid it's meant to be. And because I lack anything resembling a delicate or precise touch, my outlines (which I do in blue or purple, just because) are erratic and far too bold. In a strange way this has, I suppose, given me my own particular kind of artistic style, but I would absolutely be deluding myself if I said that any of my efforts had any real artistic merit—not even on the level of a hobbyist. In fact, I don't think that painting for me can even be considered a hobby: I don't do it regularly enough, or passionately enough, and I'm not invested in any way in getting better at it. (I might now and again glance at a tutorial or two, but I never commit to practising any of their lessons.)
And yet, painting in this very casual, very careless way is one of my favourite things to do. In fact, it's probably because I am so bad at it and because I care so little about improving that I enjoy it so much. How wonderful it is to do something without having it become part of your identity, without having it take over your life by insisting on being good art.
Contrast this with my, quote-unquote, true calling: writing short fiction. I write stories and send them out to magazines in the hope that an editor will buy them and publish them, and then that people will read them. What I write, then, has to be good. Not immediately, perhaps—there is always some self-grace given to bad writing in the very earliest stages of a draft. But very soon, the pressure to make this something worthwhile begins to mount, because at some point, it needs to go in front of an audience.
And so the fretting commences: Is this verb in the right place? Is this the best metaphor I can think of? Is this dialogue natural? Is this turn of phrase too cliché? This paragraph too abstruse? Should I use "maybe" or "perhaps"—they're stressed differently so it matters; is the story rich enough thematically? Do I add more or do I cut? It is true indeed that the only bearable state in this whole affair is the very brief moment of having just written1. Anything before or after—later comes the great pleasure of receiving rejection letters—is, as Kafka famously noted in his diary, "unending torment"2.
But when I'm painting? There is none of this, not a jot. There is no audience, no critical eye to please. I apply my paint in messy gobbets, draw people with ungainly limbs and curiously flat bodies; my perspective is all to cock; I become impatient, so that trees degenerate into a frustrated muddle of hurried, uneven strokes; my shadows require three different suns. And so what? If anyone were to criticise the fruits of my little peaceful hour, what of it? They would almost certainly be correct in their assessment. I would heartily concur: this is rubbish!
This is not to say, though, that I've never painted anything of merit. There are a few of my paintings, or at least certain elements of them, that have surprised me—that have made me start and say "Oh! That's not half bad!" But these are, more often than not, the results of happy accidents rather than any deliberate skill or design on my part. They are, in this way, like small gifts from nature—like when one stumbles on a patch of wildflowers in an otherwise dreary stretch of wood or a tree whose trunk has knotted itself somehow into a human face. There is a joy to be found in them that is so different to the satisfaction of a job well done, a craft well crafted, a story well written. When I see how my inexpert colour-blocking has somehow bestowed that ruined abbey with a surreal wonder; when I see that the inexplicably sickly reds and greens and yellows with which I rendered my drinking pals give us a mad and frantic air that is genuinely emotive; when I see that too-cavalier attitude to wetting my brush has given my childish temple-in-a-rice-paddy (originally on a sunny day) a dark, storm-drenched sense of drama—it is the joy of little miracles.
Yes, I am, without question, a lousy painter. But I'm more than happy to keep it that way.