Why do I make paintings (or other)?

A good friend once said I should try to explain | written January 2022, edited October 2026

Who knows. There can’t possibly be a reasonable end. The painter Gerhard Richter has said something to the effect of “art is the purest form of hope”. Really? Painting is a hopeless, empty, banal endeavor only good for spending money, ruining clothes and rooms, passing time, and perhaps poisoning yourself if you’re reckless. Maybe if you dump enough experienced pointlessness into time it comes through well. God forbid we bring up the egocentric and absurd investments of technical purists – by which I mean artists and/or their adorers that focus exclusively on, and value only, the mastery of technique.

Yet, Richter’s works are beautiful and I proudly see the copies of them every day hung in my home. They, like all the varied and stylistically inconsistent works I’ve hung, make my home my home instead of a roomy coffin. Moreover I even bother to travel to see these tombstones to lost time. So clearly it must be me, and my inability to find or produce the beauty I so venerate from others, that leads to my hopelessness? Perhaps, or perhaps there is a zen-ish satisfaction in seeing something someone else put even more hopeless time and effort into than I do.

I clearly have nothing to say and no right to say it. There’s nothing new to say anyway, and no new way of saying it, visually. I wish painting were like Kuhn’s vision of science as an ocean of possibilities too wide and deep to traverse except through punctuated leaps from the known. But I don’t think it is, at least for me. I probably place far too much weight on the new though. Novelty is after all much of what we seem to collectively venerate in art: new subjects, new patterns, new practices, new media, and ultimately novelty that challenges us in experiencing it. New isn’t even good enough; sometimes it’s downright bad.

Novelty’s certainly not all of us value though: beyond those hallowed and hollow halls of our esteemed and bourgeois cultural iconography – in which I think we selectively focus on the novel-for-its-time (or whatever is marketed that way) – there is a myriad of personal experience that probably does not care about novelty, on the whole at least above talent and technique. Or at least has a dramatically different frame for what is novel. This experience hides away from “culture”, among the multitudes, anywhere, and probably now exchangeably for detritus conceivable by software.

Yes even software can present simulacra of paintings that are paintings only in that they are images of what might be or has been a painting somewhere. It’s even now conceivable that a machine could be built that uses software to paint, like literally paint, with all the bells and whistles of a thousand years of human practice; but now including ideation. “Prompt to painting, for $10/month!” “Your headshot as a printed renaissance masterwork, for $50!”

We don’t have to get nearly so fancy though. We’ve been collaborating with machines of one sort probably forever. Cocreation in digital media is quite alive, if ever missing some of the fluid vibrancy of physical paint. Even printing an arbitrary digital image is painting, in a way, with inks and a metal machine’s arms. We can all seamlessly now be conductors of inert artistic machinery, both digital and physical, instead of using our bodies and training to mix fluids with hair-ended sticks onto processed plant corpses. We are after all ourselves machines, more so as we master our technique or find a productively repeatable process.

There are also now interesting algorithmic visual experiences. Active ones, interactive ones, static ones. Cryptographically-signed JPEGs as owned works. Printing bits is painting; painting of a languange in the bits via consensus and machine. Aren’t bits and math on them enough though? Something about turing completeness? Do we have to now question, in today’s society, the value of a physical work? It’s all on Insta anyway; share, like, comment, save and move on; next please. Why a framed hung painting, hand prepared one of a kind, and not a screen with a curated feed? We live online anyway, in the apparently aborted metaverse.

I’m a ghost from a time passed, with all my static pomposity decorating my walls, mostly mechanized copies anyway, and with all my splattered paint on dead plants in the studio. Classical art is done. Impressionism is done. Cubism and surrealism are done. Readymades are done. Abstraction is done. Color theorizing is done. Painting-as-performative-artifact is done. Pop and op art are done. Outsider art is done. Conceptual art is done. Hyperrealism is done. Found/trash art is done. Graffiti and street art is done. Even the destruction of works is done. Each echoes as if alive, mutated rhythmically for our supersaturated society afflicted with an absence of attention and preference for performative, autofellatious viral marketing.

So then why paint? To have people say “oooo” and “ahhh”? Maybe. We all need to feel special. To hide images away never to be seen? Maybe. That might be novel. “The greatest artist whose works can’t be viewed” might be just the salient statement for this age where anything and everything is accessible anywhere infinitely often. I’ve thought about it, but I’m not brave enough to do it. More likely the purpose is to be seen, to interact, to share the deposition representing what happened and cannot be said. Maybe make a living, or by proxy participate in a broader social conversation and create value in exchange for capital to continue.

To paint for yourself, to learn, to achieve a goal, is fine. This is personal growth, important – probably essential – for us to not go insane while we’re us, while we’re here. “We are the art” as someone said reflecting on AI writing. But personal growth is not “painting” in cartoonish and magic sociocultural lights, it’s (drum roll) personal growth. It might as well be crosswords, or sudokus, or quantum field theory, or baseball game statistics, or javascript programming, or trail running, or cooking, or whatever you want. To be clear: that’s all important, and you should have that, but it’s not “painting”.

Maybe this is why I paint though. I am stuck cycling between desperately needing it to be something – finding “painting” – and knowing it is utterly hopeless that it could ever possibly be anything when found. Part of me has awoken screaming for meaning while the other part suffocates that one with a throw pillow reading “live laugh love”. It can’t be anything, but maybe I just don’t know how it can yet? Maybe the painting is the full-throttle thrust I apply to not cross the event horizon so nearby, to not collapse into the swirling vortex of scattered entropic shards from everything that was and is never to be seen again. To try desperately to be idiosyncratically me, with all my history, with all my failures, successfully or not, confusingly or coherently, in bright color, instead of an indistinguishable emotionally greyscale shadow on the present.

Painting cannot and will not ever be anything meaningful, but I irrationally continue because that is unacceptable. Maybe that’s what Richter meant.