WASTE TIME WONDERFULLY

I got up this morning early and finished another painting. This one is for my old boss. She is a wonderful lady, she happens to be black, and she wants black themed pictures. I’d painted her a scene of a little black church in the background, and the tiny congregations at the river doing baptisms. There is a shaft of light coming from the clouds bathing one of the still wet converts as she is raised from the water.

I did a tiny, inferior copy of a painting I first admired when I watched the Cosby show many years ago. That picture is called The Funeral Procession, and it is by Ellis Wilson. My copy is not even trying to be exact. I put patterns on the cloth and because it is so much smaller than the original, the impact is minimal, but I only had two canvases left and so I used up the 16X20 piece as a give away picture.

My last piece of canvas is a 24X36 and my plan is to do a copy of the Norman Conquest of October 14, 1066. I find it amusing that my last name is norman and I was born on October 14th. Anyway, I want to do a this in the style of medieval art. There is a famous tapestry called the Bayeux Tapestry. That tapestry is located in Bayeux, France. I won’t try to copy the tapestry, but use the style.


Some, and sometimes I include myself among the some, think I should be always doing original work. If I am a serious artists, a serious painter, that I should do original work. The work I do most often might be considered a waste of time. Here is where my mind is now: the words WASTE OF TIME sound so negative. WASTE seems bad, at the least it is stupid, and at the most it is a sin against the planet. In today’s drawing I team up the words WASTE OF TIME with the word WONDERFUL.

I keep going back to resignation, because when I resign myself to certain things, it actually steers my life, activity and mood in a particular direction. What I am resigning myself to now, is the fact that I am not a great artists. I am an artists. My work is so much better than the work other people have never done. All the time, people come by, look at one of my paintings, and the typical response is something like this:

“I wish I could draw [or paint] but I don’t have that talent. I can’t draw a straight line. I can’t draw stick figures. God didn’t give me that gift.”

I don’t believe in gifts. I feel sure that anyone could do what I do, IF they did what I have done. Even so, there are millions of people painting pictures. A lot of people consider painting a hobby. It isn’t something serious they do, it is something they do to pass their free time, and something they enjoy doing.

I suppose what I do is a hobby. I instinctively shy away from the word hobby, because it disrespects the seriousness I have toward what I do. To me it is not something I do for fun, it is something that defines my life. I am a serious artist, not a hobbyist.

Nevertheless, I know there are perhaps 50,000 hobbyists doing better work than I do on the best day of my life. I am a serious artist, but I am not a great artist. I am not outstanding. It is likely that IF I live to be too old to paint, that at that point not one of my paintings will have escaped the trash bins of the world. My work is serious to me, but no one actually takes my work seriously. This fact used to bother me, but now I find it freeing. Since my work is not going to be Van Gogh quality, and at most I can hope some people will hang my work because the green in the back ground matches the fabric on their couch, it really doesn’t matter what I paint. I can paint anything I want and feel no obligation to my portfolio, or the catalogue of my life’s work, or to collectors (I have none), or anything else. I can paint what I want. It is not the final product that matters to me, it is the process. What matters to me most is the feeling I have, the zone, the altered mental state I experience while I paint. The joy of my life, at least one of the joys of my life, is the sensations I feel while I paint.

When I was a kid taking creative writing in West Springfield High School in Springfield, VA I wrote a short story about a guy painting a picture. As the guy painted I tried to convey the zombie-like ecstasy one feels when painting a picture. It probably wasn’t that good a story because it is impossible to explain the feeling to someone who has never had that feeling. If someone has had that feeling, a few words will hit the mark in their mind and they will know what you are talking about. If they have never had that feeling, there are not enough words in the world to convey that experience. The point of the story, however, was placed at the end of the story. The artist finishes the painting, steps back to admire it, sees that he has done something that, at least for the moment is acceptable, and then the artist takes that painting and tosses it into the fireplace and burns it up. Why? I was trying to explain that the important part of creativity is the creating, not the end product.

I think the way to enjoy life, to make the most of life, is to FIND THE MOST WONDERFUL WAYS TO WASTE TIME.