Why would anyone choose to major in painting at a liberal-arts college? Or, put in the form of the question that really hurts, “What can anyone do with an undergraduate degree in painting?”

The first thing to know is that there’s no cause and effect between earning good painting grades while in school and establishing a career as a painter. Only a small fraction of professional painters (i.e., painters who show their work in serious galleries and receive critical attention from people knowledgeable about art) are successful enough to support themselves strictly by painting, regardless of how good — or even well known — they are. Making a successful, self-supporting career as a painter requires an unlikely mix of focus, perseverance, ambition, and plain good luck.

Given the relentless pressure — from all sides — to tie education to “success” (otherwise known as “employment”), it’s surprising that painting manages to keep a foothold in the liberal arts curriculum at all, let alone attract majors. Painting is an utterly useless endeavor, and arguing the case for majoring in it will inevitably result in severely torqued reasoning.

Nevertheless, I posit here six types of students who should major in painting.

1. Some students have this thing called visual “talent” when it comes to a brush, and they can move the stuff called paint around on a picture plane so that it looks good — both to themselves, and to others. If they have enough of the talent thing, they should major in painting.

2. Like Richard Dreyfus in Close Encounters of the Third Kind, prospective painting majors are students who find themselves (somehow) in college painting studios, and then find themselves obsessively futzing with pigments, making something they don’t fully understand, and incapable of stopping doing it. They even come in to push the stuff around outside of class, or better yet, when they’re supposed to be in other classes. These students should major in painting.

3. The world is full of words — delivered in speech and written out in texts. Some students discover, early on, that words have their limits — particularly because they’re used sequentially, one after another (linear thinking and all that). These students are bothered by the fact that words can’t ever really achieve the whole of a thing. They’re also deeply bothered by seeing how easily words are manipulated so that the truth is destroyed. Images, on the other hand, coming as they do all at once, and hanging there for everyone to see, are what they are. They’re incapable of lying about themselves. Students who feel this way about words, who like the alternative offered by images, and who also like defacing a cloth, tacked to some boards, by means of a stick with hairs on the end, dipped in colored grease (Robert Motherwell’s definition of painting), should major in painting.

4. Some students know there’s something wrong with the world, and don’t buy the “success”-equals-happiness program. Their unhappiness with the way things are, coupled with their desire for change, lead them to create an alternative world. If they like the alternative world offered by images, and also like mushing colored pigments around with a stick with hairs on the end of it, and are good at doing this sort of thing, they should major in painting.

5. Some students, for whatever reason, want to make as much trouble for their parents as possible. They like knowing their mom and dad are in a constant state of distress over what they’re going to do with their lives. These students take particular delight in having their parents pay for them to major in something useless, like painting. They make perfect painting majors, and should rush over to the art department to declare their major as soon as possible.

6. Students who have little bits of (1) through (5) in their souls, but who also want to strut their creative stuff in the worlds of graphic design, jewelry design, fashion design, filmmaking, advertising, video game design, television, theater, shoe design, industrial design, art conservation, exhibition design, corporate party-planning design, and a whole lot of other fields, should major in painting. Sure, they’ll either have to start in the mail room and learn on the job or get some more technical training after graduation, but they’ll have under their feet a real, solid, visceral understanding of image-making that’ll make them prize catches in the long run. If they’re any good, that is.

Note: The odd students out there (truly odd, not just arty-odd) who know about outcomes assessment, and think that educational bureaucrats measuring and quantifying what they learn as painters is a good thing, should not think about majoring in painting — even for a moment.

*** (Then some folks don’t really need a canvas at all!)