represent

Works and days

Day 2, Seattle to Rochester

My friend, Jim Mott, the itinerant artist who does paintings in exchange for room and board, has begun a blog where he’s posting a day-by-day account of his 2007 drive from Seattle to Rochester. http://mottart2007.blogspot.com/ What’s wonderful about the way he’s presenting his story as a plot is that you get to see the paintings he did, on the spot, as he wandered across the country, absorbing his surroundings and turning them into the currency of his journey. Here’s a sample from one of the earliest posts, describing an experience most honest painters will corroborate, no matter how masterful they’ve become:

What I won’t tell the class is how uncomfortable painting makes me. Maybe I’m just lazy, but I find painting to be almost prohibitively strenuous, especially emotionally. There’s the strain of trying so hard to capture or convey something I see that interests me, without really knowing how to do it. It always feels that way: like I don’t know how to paint. And I rarely like what I end up with, at least not at first. Yet it seems important to do, and after the painting’s been finished for an hour, a day, a week, a year, I can usually see that something important came through, enough to have made it worthwhile. Enough, in fact, to make me not want to let go of the painting. At any rate, in the end it feels worthwhile, and that’s what keeps me going. But I almost always have to overcome a lot of resistance to get started, especially since stopping to paint something usually means two or three hours locked in struggle instead of two or three hours spent doing something more practical or pleasurable – such as wandering around looking at other things.

It’s so encouraging to hear such familiar doubts and resistance from someone who clearly knows how to paint.