Blotchy Paintings and Bad Prose: Why the Arts Suck

In my apartment, I have three little paintings hanging on the wall. I made them myself, with supplies “borrowed” from a college that will remain nameless.

From where I sit on the couch, I often find myself staring aimlessly at them as I zone off while doing homework. Because of this, I see all the errors.

The top canvas has a little sailboat on a teal lake, with orangey-yellow mountains. It reminds me of Lake Mead, Nevada. But the color pallet sort of makes me think of grapefruits. Plus, I wanted to paint tiny birds, but didn’t know how. So instead, I put tiny triangles floating through the sky. We can call it abstract, but honestly, I just think it’s weird. Still, it’s my favorite of the three.

The second one, with the nail-polish red sun and river the color of the Twitter bird, is my least favorite. I really hate how that river turned out. It just kinda dribbles down the middle of the canvas. The colors jar with each other. It looks like a poor recreation of someone else’s artwork. It’s flat, 2D, and boring. Not what I had it in mind.

The last one is a bunch of lumpy, magenta and mauve hills, with a dijon sun. I painted over that one three times before I finally gave up on it. It’s hard to make out what’s really there, because the colors started to blur together. Except, in some areas, you can see all my brush strokes, so there’s random patches with less color.

I guess what I’m saying is, I don’t like my artwork.

It’s not original, or inspired, or special. Usually it’s a conglomerate of things I find on Pinterest that fall in the sweet spot between achievable and not-lame. For some reason, other people sometimes like it.

I don’t like my writing, either.

To me, it’s bumpy and disjointed. Half the time, I don’t even know what direction I’m trying to go, so the words float around like fish, bumping around the page as my brain wanders from idea to idea. I like the act of writing (usually), but I’m not sure I’m very good at it. I’m not sure I’m really a “writer”.

See, most writers are these blazing, passionate people, these martyrs for their work. In my head, they wake up in the middle of the night, sweating over their newest genius idea. Still in their torn-up t-shirt pajamas they scramble for the pen and paper they keep by their bedside for moments like these.

They work for hours at a time, through the night, and sometimes days on end. They sit in attics and scribble their brilliant works with cramping hands. They pee in bottles so they won’t have to get up. Every scrap of paper in their house has some question-marked idea, some stunning plot twist.

Maybe it’s exaggerated, or romantic, but when you sit in a class with thirty other students under the age of 22 and half of them have finished their first novel already…

So no, I don’t feel like I’m a writer. I write, sure. But hey I paint too and that certainly doesn’t make me an artist. Just like baking doesn’t make me a baker, and singing poorly in the shower doesn’t make me a singer.

But I’m trying to learn not to trust my feelings so much. They have done me dirty way too many times to count. Because even though I dislike those tiny little paintings on my wall, none of my roommates hate them. And if I can bring myself to give away a piece of artwork, even if I think it sucks, I find that other people don’t notice the crooked lines and smudged paint in the same way.

I worry the basis for the novel I’m working on is stupid, and every single story idea is cliche or cheesy or straight-up lame. But when I can work up the gumption to show my friend, she doesn’t hate it. Not like I do. Sure, the prose isn’t perfect, and I over-use commas, and I have a serious problem with run-on sentences. But she can sift through the dirt and grime and typos find the tiny little speck of gold in it.

I’m not saying that the reader won’t notice every. single. tiny. misplaced detail. Because trust me, they will. But I guess the act of writing isn’t so much about doing it perfectly, it’s just about doing it.

And compared to painting, it’s WAY easier to edit.