On giving your true self away

Painting, an existential crisis and a new, simple goal

I don’t really know what I’m doing right now but what I do know is that I want to make pictures. 

Perhaps all writers have an existential crisis when they’ve finished writing a book, I don’t know. It happened last time too. Whenever there is a stop I wonder what the hell I’m doing. Whenever there is an end, I tend to completely lose myself in the choice of new beginnings. There is an expectation that the next thing will line up neatly – that as soon as you’ve finished, the next bright thought will rise from its seat and knock confidently on your door. Oh ideas aren’t a problem, they never are, but ones that stay? Ones that don’t fade into ghosts after a few days of trying? They don’t come along very often. Which is all a long-winded way of saying that I’m blank just now. I don’t know. I don’t really know who I am, what I want to say next, what the market wants, what I’m capable of. I am sick of my own voice.

It wouldn’t matter so much if it wasn’t for money. Coming up with good ideas and turning them into something marketable is how I make my living. It makes the times in between book contracts particularly frightening. You know something will come along, but when? The clock ticks. It can lead to a desperate kind of scrabbling, trying to mould things out of sand that sag quickly. It’s hard to hold your nerve, not to end up wasting your time on panicked mirages when you’re better off just waiting for something real, however long it takes.

On the solstice, the sun burned the longest that it would burn all year and I lay awake burning too. I knew scrabbling wasn’t the answer. I knew that, in a way, this falling apart, this complete dissolution of all certainty or confidence is part of the creative process, a way to make space, to bulldoze the house, to demolish your ego, so that something new can grow. I came back to basic questions. What do I love? What do I have? What do I have in that I can give out right now? Work for me is always ultimately about some kind of service, a kind of offering. Here I am; let me give myself away. 

What came with the new day was raw and true, as it always is in the end. I have eyes that want to witness. I have a heart that wants to fall in love with the things around me. I have fingers that want to make pictures, a yearning for colour and for something visceral that I can touch, feel, something that isn’t just more self-obsessed thought. And so that’s what I’ve been doing: I have been painting every day. 

I have always painted but often not painted. I have spent most of my life coming up with reasons why it was too difficult to take seriously. What I was rejecting wasn’t making art, it was making art in the way I would have to make art, given my life, my circumstances, my skill. I think that’s often the case. What we think of as a good excuse is often just a denial of reality. You could do it, but it would mean doing it in a way that might be or feel second-best, a way that might show up your inexperience, your inadequacies, your lack of resources, time, energy, a way that reflects who you really are, that might not make you look as good as you wish you did. I wanted to paint properly, impressively, so I often didn’t paint at all. I suspect my book-writing uncertainty is another extension of this; another invitation to slowly accept the truth and disappointment that I’m me and not somebody else and that the book I should write next must, inevitably, reflect this.

For now, I am keeping it very simple. Every day, I am turning to what I have – my little patch of urban light and space – and I am letting myself fall in love with something. I am letting that love spill out until it makes colour and marks on the page, all joy, and I am writing about what I see too, just fragments, feeling. I am forming it without thought until it is done. I am trying not to judge what comes, or doesn’t, what works, what fails. Its opportunity was a gift; I took it. Let’s leave it at that.

The paintings I am making are very small. I have no room for an easel or canvases or lots of supplies and that’s OK. The paintings I am making betray my lack of formal training and show my strong will and my open heart and I like them for that. I am going to sell them, I think. Why not – I need the money and maybe they will make people happy. For now, I think I’m just going to paint what’s beautiful or meaningful to me and write a few simple words about each thing, see what happens, and not attempt to be any more important or clever than that.

I’ve said it before, but when you don’t know what to do, I think maybe the best thing is to just sit with what you’ve got and find a way to express it, truthfully, with as much vulnerability as you can manage. This is what I’ve got right now: paper, colour, love. Is it what the world wants, needs? I don’t know, but here it is; I offer it with an open heart.

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