Painting a Life

Everyone starts with a blank slate. One person may have the richest, highest-quality canvas with the best paints while another has just a piece of scrap paper with some old watercolors. But with the right skills, the scrap paper and watercolors can come to life and inspire awe while the rich canvas with the expensive oil paints can end up nothing but an eyesore.

Some people end up with a single, magnificent work of art, and some have many decent works in different styles. Fewer still create several beautiful works. And too many go unfinished.

Everyone makes mistakes while painting. While the mistakes can’t be erased, they can be altered and beautified such that the whole end result seems to have been intended.

And if there are so many mistakes that an acceptable painting becomes too difficult, there is always the option of throwing out the entire painting away and starting fresh. It seems a shame to throw away something on which so much time was spent, but if it’s an undesirable painting, it can always be tossed and replaced with another blank canvas.

Some will see a painting and think it ugly and disgusting, while others look upon the same painting and see beauty. Some will create paintings they hate but others love, and some create paintings they alone love.

Many don’t really paint, but rather fill in the colors of the outline stenciled for them. These works can be nice, but are invariably uninteresting and uninspiring in comparison with the works improvised from the painter’s imagination.

Some artists continually look at their neighbors’ paintings, compare them to their own, and try to copy them. These artists always fail to paint up to their potential.

In the end, each of the billions of paintings created throughout human history is one little piece of an enormous jigsaw puzzle. Some pieces are well-regarded while others may be seen as an embarrassment, but without any one of them the puzzle would be incomplete. And it’s a pretty incredible puzzle.