I’ve left Painting’s Edge, the Idyllwild, Calif., summer painting workshop, where all that counts is painting, and returned to the real world (New York), where all that seems to count is money. Rich “New York-based” painters have gone off to the Hamptons or Tuscany for the summer. Poorer ones are dragging themselves to their hot and sticky studios at the end of their day jobs, with the occasional day off at Jones Beach.

From a distance, I can now reflect on what I experienced at Painting’s Edge. There I encountered, firsthand, the intense pressure that’s now on painters to justify why they are painters. When I was in art school in the late ’70s, I saw it begin, but the young painters today, unlike my generation of painters, find it almost impossible to locate truly inspiring contemporary artists for whom painting’s meaning can be derived from what a painting looks like. Instead, the few remaining artists who are sticking to painting who are making any name for themselves are making paintings that derive their meaning from the “ideas” behind their paintings. The result is that young artists feel compelled to offer long, complicated explanations about their intentions (many of which I dutifully listened to during the critiques I conducted with the painters who signed up for me).

It takes an extremely talented and mature artist to hold together a big theme, yet many of the young artists I encountered were desperately trying to make their paintings “reflect their interest” in some enormous idea or other. Some of them wanted to address themes so big that they really should first earn a Ph.D. in anthropology or Chinese before putting brush to canvas. Yet to my way of thinking, it’s hard enough to paint a still life, let alone paint something that carries multiple cultural references.

Actually, hot art schools such as Cal Arts put the screws to young painters to give up painting entirely. Why make that fuddy-duddy stuff when you can make video, sound, or installation art about all sorts of profound philosophical ideas, interesting intersections of images and sounds, or just plain goofy materials? And if the young painter still refuses to give up painting, even after being exposed to this truth, the pressure is relentless for him or her to come up with never-before-imagined surrealist images (the more random and violent the better), or paintings based on ideas and art from outside of Western culture, or paintings whose subject is the meaning of painting, or paintings that can be hung in some fancy way so that they are no longer paintings but rather a whole “piece.”

Ever since the invention of painting on canvas, paint itself has been part of the meaning of a painting. At Idyllwild, however, I learned the big truth. Although today’s painters are quick to assert that they love the “process” of their “practice,” they could easily switch to installation art in two shakes of a lamb’s tail.

And although it’s not uncommon for young painters to believe deeply in their images, rarely do they seem to believe that their images absolutely have to be done in paint. In living in an image-driven world, we’re strangely akin to people who lived in the Middle Ages. The big difference is that theirs was a deeply religious age, whereas ours is profoundly secular.

Painting’s Edge clarified for me that we live in a time when painting’s true sister is, once again, poetry — not because of any similarity in the mediums (there’s virtually none), but because both have been marginalized and are now loved by a relative few. (I’m talking about living, breathing, current painting and poetry. Francis Bacon pictures selling for zillions at auction, and T.S. Eliot still being prime dissertation fodder, doesn’t change this.) But as I said in my lecture to the Painting’s Edge residents, this is the thrust of history and to resist it is to be like Don Quixote jousting at windmills. Perhaps our real inspiration should come from the Irish monks of the 9th century. In working quietly and lovingly at preserving the heritage of a classical culture they didn’t necessarily fully understand, they helped save civilization. Every brushstroke, dear painters, can be an illumination.