Art, like any other professional career, must be planned like a business. Which means you have to schedule your artwork like projects. You have to have steps and deadlines, and you must try to meet these deadlines, because in business, time is money. Right?
I scheduled 5 nights for this painting. I ended up spending 3 weeks, and I’m not even sure if it’s finished.
The client’s request was simple enough – paint Disney’s castle. That alone plunged me into a mad world of decisions. I could paint it like dark evil – that would be exciting – but hey, it’s a wedding, so it has to be romantic. What kind of romantic? Where? What time of day, sunny, cloudy or drizzly, tropical or temperate? How tall is the grass? It’s not like photography where the thing is right there in front of us. There were days spent erasing large sections of paint, and there were sleepless nights when not a single drop of paint was applied.
Then, finally, that fateful hour arrived – that single, magical stroke that made me go, “ah! That’s the one! That defines ‘it’!” Only for me to wake up the next day wondering, would a tree beside the couple make the painting more beautiful?
In many ways, art is remarkably similar to life. Our country tries to develop our lives like business projects, with finely-crafted schedules and measurable grades of success and failure, but life doesn’t work like this. We are not born to live life like a to-do list. We are born to feel, and we base our decisions on feelings because the road to Disney’s castle isn’t laid out bare in front of us. We think we’ve found the perfect job, the perfect home, the perfect partner, but we wake up the next day wondering, why isn’t everything as beautiful as we’ve planned?
My painting is done, but never complete. No painting ever is. But I move on to the next one. On the last day, I’ll place every single painting on a giant, magnificent collage, and hopefully I’ll say to myself, life was beautiful.