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.