Painting is Hard

So is love.

I once thought about collecting all the club-footed things people said to me when beholding one of my paintings. But I didn’t collect them, and I can’t remember them, except for this one, which particularly stings when you fancy yourself a portrait painter: “Faces are hard . . .”

Painting is agony. A friend who is also a painter called me the other day in a total flap because a client wanted to come over to pick up her painting (my friend leaves her sold paintings on her front porch for pick up). But the client also wanted to – gasp! – meet my friend!




I was confused about the problem. What was it? Turns out there was a mix up. My friend was upset because the client actually liked my friend’s paintings and wanted to talk about them. My friend, however, doesn’t like her paintings. The mix up was my friend confusing how she feels about her work with how someone else feels about her work.

I patiently explained to her that clients are like lovers: you don’t get to dictate what they like or why. If they like you (your work), that’s their business, regardless of how much you loath yourself (or your work, which is the same thing). It’s just one of life's little quirks we can’t control.

I remember having an epiphany a few years ago in my therapist’s office as I wailed about not being able to paint like my idol, Jenny Saville. According to moi, I couldn't get the paint thick enough, or the colours clean enough, and my ideas for subject matter were not as beefy and compelling as Jenny's. Ever patient with my disastrous life problems, my therapist offered this shockingly sensible pearl of wisdom: why you don’t you just be the painter you are?



After a decade of painting on and off (mostly off), I have noticed a pattern. It goes something like this:

Day 1 — I’m a fucking genius! This painting is going to ROCK!!
Day 2 — Damn, the colours are getting muddy and the structure is weakening.
Day 3 — Oh my god, I have painted Mr. Potato Head: the dismantled version.
Day 4 — I hate myself.
Day 5 — I still hate myself. I reach for a large bag of Doritos.
Day 6 — I go back into the studio and pull it (and myself) back from the brink.
Day 7 — No time to rest. There’s so much more to do.
Day 8 — I realize everything can be fixed with more paint. Genius!
Day 9, 10, 11 . . . 20 — This 3-day painting is clearly not a 3-day painting.
Day 21 — There is no such thing as a 3-day painting.
Day 22 — I’ll never make a living at this.
Day 23 — Back at my desk, writing communications copy.


Then there was the time I regaled another painter friend with life-threatening adventures in painting failure. How was I to even contemplate living if I didn’t know what to paint? Or, when I figured out my subject matter, how to paint it? This painter friend should rightfully have his own image and alter in my home. He’s my new guru. A gentle man who didn’t have my opportunities for pursuing a graduate degree in painting, he blossomed from an adequate painter into a stellar painter through a process I should know by now because it's the same process for meditation (which I don’t do) and for running (ditto) and for just about everything else one wishes to learn and master. It’s called practice. After ten years of painting consistently, you are bound to improve. After ten years of whining and complaining instead of painting, you are bound to not improve. The math is simple enough for even a math flunky like me to understand.

But the real gift David gave me that day was this. He said, “Liz, it’s just painting. Where’s the harm?”

Recently, I fell in lerve. Woody Allen invents this word in Annie Hall when "love" cannot adequately describe how he feels. For me, I'm not talking about love. Love requires time + a modicum of sanity. But lerve is the only word I have at my disposal right now to describe this loud, perverse, mind-numbing, soul-cracking volcanic eruption that has cast a cloud of ash so thick over my being that any further travels to the Isle of Sanity have been suspended indefinitely. After so much heartbreak in my past, I thought I would never feel this kind of excitement or this level of connection ever again. It’s ridiculous because a) I don’t really know this person very well, so what I’m most likely experiencing is a massive case of projection and b) my unerring divining rod for the wrong person is quivering so violently I can barely hold it in my death grip.

So, I called my painter friend (who hates her work) and admitted my folly, castigating myself for acting like Liz at Twenty, an age at which I had as much sense as, well, as a twenty-year-old who thinks she’s in love. I expected a sound tongue lashing followed by a smart smack to shock me back into my senses. But that’s not what I got. She said, "It’s amazing, really, that J (her partner) and I argue about the same thing and in the same way after twenty years of being together, and after twenty years of therapy that should have made our arguments at least evolve!" Basically, her message was, who the hell knows what wisdom is. But isn’t it wonderful to be alive?

Added to her wisdom is a little from Charlie Kauffman (one of my favourite screen writers). In the film Adaptation, the protagonist, Charlie, is hiding with his (imaginary) twin brother, Donald, in a Florida swamp. They are being tracked by a murderously in-love Meryl Streep (if you want to know why, see the movie). As the brothers crouch behind a log, waist deep in alligator-infested waters, Charlie, crippled with self-loathing, takes this opportunity to ask Donald, awkward, goofy, and vulnerable, about the time in public school when Donald declared his love to a girl and she laughed at him. Charlie wonders why that never seemed to humiliate Donald. Why didn’t it destroy him? Donald patiently explains to Charlie that his love for the girl was his, i.e. even the girl could not take it away from him. How she felt was her business. How he felt was his. And then he gives the most powerful line of the whole movie: you are what you love, not what loves you.


If that’s true, then you get to love no matter how the person or thing at the other end of your love feels about you, i.e. I get to love painting even when painting hates me (which it does. Often). If the object of your love has no idea you exist, you still get to enjoy your butterflies all the same. Just try to squash them. You can't. So you may as well put away the Tums and accept the jitters.

I have a feeling this tsunami of an infatuation will pass and nothing will come of it. But it has accomplished two much-needed metaphorical smacks. A) It dismantled – misguided-belief-by-misguided-belief – all my carefully designed plans for avoiding heartbreak. And, B) It put my belief system back together like a Mr. Picasso Potato Head, making a mockery of perspective in order to show me that life happens in multiple dimensions at once, and never the way you expect. Our lives unfold more like Escher’s hand drawing itself – in the moment, unpredictably, and with its own terrible beauty.

I feel pretty certain I won't land in a soft spot with this wild-ride of a crush who is so hot he could turn volcanic ash to glass, but at least it has given me a chance to practice love, or lerve. At least I have that. And painting.

OH. MY. GOD.

I’m so over myself. I SWEAR!

When I received the most courageous emails from fellow sufferers after my last post – tender, generous, honest messages from people who are not only fighting for their own lives in one way or another, but also bravely staying the course, against all odds in some cases – these amazing souls made me realize two things:

1) I’m not alone (which is not some kind of misery-loves-company stance. In fact, I immediately went into Liz-fix-it mode, wantonly dispensing unsolicited e-therapy so as to heal their pain, if I could.)

And . . .

2) Andy would definitely not be impressed with my current state of mind, as one friend pointed out in a much-needed tough-love e-mail (Thanks, P!). It’s true. I know exactly what Andy would think about my wallowing because we were psychically liked (as I am with my younger brother, Justin, and my father, Fred, and my sister-in-law, Dawn.) Andy would have said, “You can’t help me. Get on with your life!”


I feel ashamed that I made some of you worry about me. Unfortunately, I can’t take it back. But since I’m trying to accept myself warts and all these days, all I can do now is say thank you and I’m sorry. No, really, thank you for indulging me in a moment of pure self-pity. And I’m so sorry I took you on a journey that came to an abrupt halt the next day when, for no apparent reason, I was right as rain again. Sometimes all it takes is a piece of really moist chocolate cake, or a chance encounter with a celebrity.


A few weeks ago, I met a guy in the dog park with his beyond-gorgeous Italian greyhound, sporting an equally gorgeous little sweater. The dog, not the man. (Well, also the man.) So, I asked the man where he got the doggie sweater, thinking how great it would look on Shy. The man said he’d look for the card of the woman who makes them and bring it to the park next day. I didn’t see him for a few days, but when I did see him next he said, “I brought that woman’s card with me everyday this week to give to you. I’m not sure I have it today.” But he fished in his pocket gamely and found it! That, however, is not the happy ending to this story.


Ever since then, we’ve seen each other almost daily at the dog park (no, this is not a blossoming romance, girls and boys, so get your heads out of that story or you’ll be disappointed with the punch line). Recently, I asked him what he does with this days and he told me he works in the theatre. Yesterday, I asked for more specifics about his work, so he told me he does some writing and directing. I happen to know exactly one person who works in the theatre, so I did the do-know-know-my-friend-Geoff thing. The gent said yes he did, and that Geoff is a marvelous actor. (Must tell Geoff). That made me feel so connected and, yes, even a little cool (although technically Geoff is more a friend of a friend, I decided that really didn’t matter. Knowing him gave me cachet by proxy.). Then the gent reciprocated by asking what I do. Communications and portrait painting, I told him. To which he responded with his own do-you-know-so-and-so-who-is-also-a-painter thing. But I did not know his painter person. So he asked me my name. “Liz Phillips,” I said, to which he responded, “Oh,” before adding, as if it would not ring any bells, “My name is Daniel MacIvor --”

“OH. MY. GOD!!!!!!!!!! YOU’RE DANIEL MACIVOR???!!!!!”


Yup. I yelled it. Right there on the street. With hipsters on the other side of the street watching me as they sucked back their espressos.



I’m not really a star fucker. But I am impressed by talent. And Daniel MacIvor (because there is no way I can call him Daniel) has talent out the wazoo. How could Daniel MacIvor be casually talking to me in the dog park about dog sweaters and other things so mundane I can’t even remember what they were when he is the creator of Past Perfect, a film I caught on Bravo one night when I was living at my father’s house after returning from a failed relationship in Seattle (and on the heels of my fire in Montreal)? (Synopsis: Past Perfect “intercuts between two days, two years apart. The first: a flight from Vancouver to Halifax, where Charlotte and Cecil, two strangers, meet in seats 3a & 3c and fall in love. The second: a Saturday two years later, where Charlotte and Cecil now a couple, fight, break-up and finally reunite.” Thank you IMDB). What story could have been more perfect for me at that time? None, I tells ya!

Some of you may have no idea who Daniel MacIvor is, and that's OK. Celebrity is in the mind of the beholder. I'm also hoping that making a fool of one's self is also in the mind of the beholder. Not the espresso-chugging beholder beholding me, mind you. Maybe yelling Daniel MacIvor's name made his day. Knowing that he had thought to bring me the dog-sweater-maker's card every day made mine. Imagine, Daniel MacIvor thinking of me as he made his way to the dog park!

So, there it is. My life as a dramedy. While it’s true that most of life’s unfolding is out of our hands (when/how we die, who loves us), we do have an insane amount of control over the rest (when/how I will write an article for publication, or when/how I will make a body of paintings for exhibition, or who I will choose to love) – we can create a great deal of our reality through thoughts and actions. (Yes, folks, the Liz of old is back!) It’s also true that while we don’t always get what we want – kids, partners, clear-cut and satisfying careers – we often do get what we need: a Liz Lemon moment of slipping on a proverbial banana peel to remind you that life’s randomness can also be really effing funny.