Painting
“If someone would have told me two years ago…”
It is evidence that we make plans to stray from them. These words solidify the fact that nothing can truly be set in stone.
At every moment in our lives we have a picture of who we’re supposed to be; pre-planned, staged, shot and very rarely accurate. We spend time backing these paintings up with actions that we ultimately do not believe in, trying to colour inside the lines of a narrow, rigid canvas.
If I have learned anything from my experience as a person, it is that we are not fine-tipped brushes or 0.5mm pencil tips that can be used to paint perfectly inside the lines. We are liquid paint, we run and fade. We are the thick end of a wax crayon. We bleed outside of the lines, we melt under heat. We are pigmented pastel, staining whatever it is we touch.
If all art is, is planning out colours and layouts and pictures, there would be no beauty to appreciate. If there was no chaos to tame with our human experience — no pain to overcome, no bad moments to mark our time — life would be grey and one-tracked and unremarkable.
We may draw straight lines and perfect curves to create the picture in our heads, we may even very rarely find those fine-tipped brushes to paint the tiny perfect moments. But if we never draw crooked lines or colour outside of them; if we never spill some paint or stain our canvas, we will never savour the story of finding beauty in something imperfect.
And what is life? If not a meandering cluster of imperfect lines and strokes and splats and splashes of a painting we only truly finish when we die?
