As you know, if you don’t paint everyday, the paint on your palette dries up. Good-bye expensive paint. This will contribute to you using lesser and lesser amounts and then your paintings will go downhill from there. You’ve heard of the saran wrap trick, the freezing trick, well forget freezing and saran wrap. That’s for amateurs.  Now – drum roll please! – here’s the real trick of tricks: keep your paints….

Learning to paint has less to do with learning new techniques than it does with learning new ways to be free.

The separation of the teaching of painting from discussions of politics or literature or philosophy or whatever is entirely artificial and, I would add, harmful to the growth of anyone seeking truly free expression. In order to teach art, one has to be free to move seamlessly across disciplinary boundaries. In order to make art, one has to be free to “let go of many common and overestimated things” (Henri) such as stale, grade school, thread-bare justifications of power and privilege that also have the effect of limiting what art we make and how we make it.

The measure of a painting, as in all other life-giving activities, is the feeling one has as one does the activity, whether it is making love or making a painting. The payoff is always in the moment of expressing, and therefore realizing, one’s feelings. This is the moment of creation. And delightfully, the process creates the work. The painting simply follows, as by-product of the experience.

In every single painting, assuming we wish to create a sense of space and that we are painting from nature, we want the values to be properly related; that is, we would like dark things to actually be darker than light things. So here’s the way to do this: SQUINT and compare.  Because we cannot focus when we squint, it is far easier to see the whole thing and compare the values.

Robert Henri, in his classic The Art Spirit, actually dedicates several pages to the brushstroke and the feelings they evoke. Here is just a small sample of his descriptions: “There are timid, halting brush strokes…other strokes which inspire a sense of vigor, direction, speed, fullness and all the varying sensations an artist may wish to express. The mere brushstroke itself must speak….It is showy, shallow, mean, meager, selfish, has the skimp of a miser; is rich, full, generous, alive and knows what is going on.”

Very powerful and privileged people have engineered the art world for their own personal private gain and this in turn has required that a special class of art experts control the definition of art and thus keep the tastes and sensibilities of the larger public out of the game. As this class of educators has taught us all, art that might move us at first sight – ie, art that is immediately popular –  can’t possibly be profound or important. Such art is, to use their words, too “accessible.” Art that flat out makes no sense or, better, if it offends, is of a much higher caliber: such art is difficult and challenging and it is investible precisely because it is only knowable by elites.

We could talk about line and color and technique and material and “how-to” for a long time. But if we are not fully free to be who we are, what’s the point?