Other painters wouldn’t put it quite this way, I’m sure, but painting the kind of clean abstract paintings I paint (the neat sort that are made up of clearly defined shapes) is a whole lot like weeding and vacuuming. True, people generally weed and vacuum out of necessity, whereas painters paint pictures out of desire (ever since modernism, that is—things were significantly different before the 19th century). Yet for all their differences, painters, weeders, and vacuumers share a deep longing for perfection.
Take weeding. “What a mess,” I always think, surveying the jumble of weeds that have taken over my garden. Crawling on my hands and knees among the flowers, I furiously rip out enormous clumps of huge weeds (which are, of course, nothing more than plants human beings have decided do not deserve to live in a certain place). I note with satisfaction that the flowers, previously hidden from sight, can now be seen. Suddenly, out of nowhere, a whole bunch of smaller weeds pop up. How’d that happen? Ah, but it turns out they’ve been there the whole time. I see them only now, after having pulled out the big ones. Sighing, I set about on a second weeding. Perhaps even a third. Soaked in sweat and covered in dirt, I quit when I can no longer move.
Same thing with vacuuming. In the beginning, I cheerily hoover up dust bunnies, cat whiskers, cookie crumbs, perhaps a random piece of thread. Finished, I look about the room with what approaches sublime pleasure. How clean, how golden in the afternoon light. Suddenly, I see a speck of dirt, sparkling like an evil diamond, sitting on the floor in the middle of the room. How the hell did that get there? I run to the vile thing, scooping it up, only to discover with dismay that there are tons more of them, all around the room. They came from nowhere, and they are everywhere. I move about, bending over to pick them up with my fingers individually, one at a time. For a brief but incandescent moment, a blip in the infinity of time, the room is perfection itself. But no. It was only teetering on perfection. Out of nowhere, a tiny ball of cat hair comes drifting across the floor.
There’s no turning the mess of life into Platonic forms. To paint is to wrestle with goopy gooey stuff. Yes, there are spasmodic, incomprehensible moments of creativity that make painting different from weeding or vacuuming, but much of it involves craft rather than creativity. As with any craft, the start is rough. Mistakes are easily corrected at that point. But the more a painting advances, the more difficult it becomes to correct the mistakes—unless, that is, you simply let the painting become something entirely different. Near the end, even the tiniest slip in a straight line or a curve stands out. Fixing the errors risks ruining the painting.
The devil, it’s said, lurks in the detail. Mies van der Rohe added that God lurks there as well. A painter must know when to quit, and is well advised to remember Jan Van Eyck’s motto. “Als Ich Kann”—the best I can do. Or, as a painter friend used to say (invoking a far more prosaic phrase), “Good enough for government work.”
