I paint because it puts me where I am.
I am not thinking about what happened yesterday or what somebody said about me today. I am looking at the surface. At the color. At the shape of things. Hours go by that way in the studio with the garage door open to the Pacific far below.
I painted through the investigations, the trials, all of it. I kept going out to the studio and I’m still working every day. The market, the critics or the committees asking who bought what never mattered. What mattered was the daily practice, where neither the weight of the past nor the imaginary future penetrated.
For a long time, I was very good at destroying myself. Painting gave my hands another job.
People talk about what a painting means, but most of that comes later. While I am painting, I am not trying to explain myself. I am trying to get the color right. I am trying to find the form. I am trying to know when to stop.
Almost always the small mistakes become the most beautiful parts of any painting.
For a stretch, I painted the stolen images of me at the bottom of my addiction. The images were everywhere, printed over and over again in the New York Post and Daily Mail. They were meant to shame me. Painting them helped free me from that shame. On the canvas, the photographs became something I could look at without getting lost in the misery they captured. I could see past the tabloid story.
Looking at them on the canvas, I did not find the degenerate the tabloids had sold. I found grief. I found compassion.
I found resilience.
I love finishing a painting. But the finished thing is not really why I do it.
The process is the purpose.
The post Hunter Biden: Why I Paint appeared first on LAmag.
