I Didn’t Paint It on the Wall for Decoration

There is more I want to make, say, experience, and leave behind than I will ever have time for. I understand that urgency. Especially now. When you have had to fight for your life, you become a little less interested in spending what remains waiting for somebody else to approve of it.

Artists have to have some of the thickest skin in the world. We spend hours, sometimes months, making something deeply personal, then put it where somebody can walk by and dismiss it in three seconds. Too much color. Not enough color. Too strange. Too simple. “I don’t get it.” Everybody is going to have an opinion.

And nobody comes to the work through exactly the same door we did.

They haven’t lived our memories, carried our grief, or noticed the things that stayed with us long enough to become a painting. They may see something entirely different. They may see nothing that moves them at all. You have to leave room for that without letting it convince you that what you saw wasn’t worth making.

That takes bravery.

There is a particular vulnerability in hanging your work on a wall and standing beside it. Your name is attached. Your choices are visible. Something you could have kept safely to yourself is now available for strangers to judge. And then you have to go back to the studio and do it again.

The same sensitivity that lets us notice, feel, and make the work doesn’t conveniently disappear when someone has something ugly to say. Thick skin takes practice. Some days you have more of it than others. You keep working anyway.

For me, the freedom comes when I know why I’m making something. When the work is honest, when I have given it the attention it deserves, and when it speaks to something I believe needs to be seen, I don’t give a tinker’s damn whether everybody likes it.

I care about doing the work well. I care about what it carries into the world. I care about whether it makes somebody pause, feel seen, remember something, or ask a question they might otherwise have avoided.

Universal approval would be a mighty dull thing to paint toward.

So those words stay on the wall, where I can see them on the days I need reminding. Time is moving. There is work to do. There are things worth saying, even when saying them makes somebody uncomfortable.

Everybody gets an opinion. I still get to pick up the brush.