Is My Art Good?

Don’t Paint Yourself Into a Corner.

Sometimes I find myself having conversations with myself about what it really means to be an artist.

Not necessarily about painting techniques, colors, composition, or even what makes a painting good. But something much bigger.

Am I a good artist? Is my art good? What does that actually mean?

And who determines that?

Not all artists are necessarily good artists. Not everyone who paints creates something extraordinary. Some people are technically accomplished, others are experimental, and some simply enjoy the process of making something.

But what separates one from another?

Is it talent? Imagination? Experience? Originality? The ability to communicate something through what you create?

Or is it simply a matter of perception?

I think about artists like Michelangelo, Van Gogh, Pollock, and Warhol. Completely different personalities, different approaches, and different ways of interpreting the world.

Each found a way to express something that was uniquely their own.

And today, we look back at their work and recognize their contributions. But they were individuals first, trying to figure things out in their own way.

Which brings me back to myself.

I’ve spent a good portion of my life creating, experimenting, discovering, and trying to understand what painting means to me.

And there’s an interesting contradiction in that.

I don’t know that I ever necessarily wanted to be an artist. Or perhaps I resisted becoming what I already was.

I think part of that had to do with the old expression, painting yourself into a corner.

I never wanted to do that.

I never wanted to become so consumed by one thing that it became my entire identity. I didn’t want to be trapped in some romanticized version of the struggling artist, alone in a studio, painting away the hours, with that being my only outlet or reason for existence.

I wanted to live.

I wanted to experience things, meet people, discover places, explore ideas, and have a life outside the canvas.

And perhaps there’s nothing wrong with that.

Being an artist doesn’t mean you have to surrender everything else that makes you who you are.

We all have our own paths, our own destinations, and our own ideas about what we want out of life.

But sometimes I wonder whether we spend so much time trying to figure out who we’re supposed to become that we overlook who we already are.

And then there’s the business of being an artist.

That’s another conversation entirely.

Today, what motivates me to paint is also the possibility of selling my work. There’s a financial reality attached to it. You create something, invest your time, energy, imagination, and experience, and eventually you have to put a price on it.

Think about that for a moment.

You’re taking something that comes from within you, something personal, something that may have taken hours or days to develop, and trying to assign it a monetary value.

How do you put a price tag on your passion?

How do you separate the value of the painting from the personal experience of creating it?

And what happens when something you believe in doesn’t sell?

Does that make it less valuable? Does it mean the work isn’t good? Or does it simply mean the right person hasn’t discovered it?

I don’t pretend to have all those answers.

And maybe that’s part of the conversation I’m having with myself.

Am I trying to figure out whether I’m a good artist? Am I trying to understand what makes art meaningful? Am I trying to reconcile the creative side of myself with the business side?

Maybe it’s all of those things.

But I keep coming back to that expression:

Don’t paint yourself into a corner.

Don’t limit what you can become. Don’t allow your occupation, your expectations, or even your own definition of yourself to become a limitation.

You can be an artist and still want everything else life has to offer.

You can enjoy creating without having to define your entire existence by it.

You can question your work, change direction, experiment, and discover something entirely different tomorrow.

And perhaps that’s what I’ve been trying to understand all along.

Maybe being an artist isn’t about arriving at some final destination where you finally understand everything.

Maybe it’s about remaining open to the possibilities.

So, is my art good?

I suppose that’s a question I’ll continue to ask myself.

But maybe there’s another question that’s just as important:

Am I still discovering something about myself through what I create?

And if the answer is yes, perhaps there’s still plenty of room to explore.

After all, I never wanted to paint myself into a corner.