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I received a lot of feedback, all positive, on the previous blog entry addressing my desire to develop a Mission Statement as an artist. Several readers suggested that I consider something they’ve heard me say over the years, which is that “I cannot not paint.” I can state confidently that I came up with this convoluted phrasing to describe myself. Even so, I subsequently learned that I am not, even remotely, the first person to say it. Myriad artists have expressed the compulsion to paint, draw, sculpt, photograph, dance etc. using these words, probably for centuries. Because we cannot not do it.

It’s odd phrasing, isn’t it? Sounds like Yoda. But this is the only way it can be said. We are the dope addicts of human creativity. For us, creating art – good/bad, original/derivative, professional/amateur – is not about pleasure or self-reward. We do it even when we don’t feel like it. We do it when we hate what we are producing. We do it when we feel stagnant and bored and when we question whether we ever had any frigging talent at all. We do it also when the miracle happens and the image we paint actually approximates, or even exceeds, what we intended. Dry spells come and go. Periodic feelings of stagnation lead to the desire to throw the damn paintbrushes away and do just about anything else instead. These don’t last. 

We paint because we cannot not.

This is not the exclusive domain of artists. I have a friend who owns a structural engineering firm. He tells me that he chose this career path because he cannot not do it; that, were he to retire today, he would have to take on a technically complex hobby so that he might “keep building things and figuring them out until I die.” This nexus between engineering and art gives me hope. If applying the mathematics, physics, and insight necessary to ensure that buildings stay up shares common ground with slapping colored liquid onto something flat, then surely world peace is achievable. I say we give every politician on earth an architectural design, a calculator and a beginner’s paint set, then lock the doors and go to the beach.

“I cannot not paint” is a statement about who I am. It is not, alas, a mission statement. Efforts to make it into one adds words and detracts meaning. So, let it stand on its own two little feet as a declaration. In fact, I have done just that. Go to my home page and see for yourself.

As for mission statements, option five from “Mission Control” stayed with me. It was the one claiming the mission “to capture the essence, one painting at a time.” I’ve simplified this to remove the word “the.” Upon reflection, I concluded there is no such thing as “the” essence of anything. What is the essence, for example, of Humphrey Bogart?  Mad magazine caricaturist Mort Drucker could capture Bogart as well as if not better than the finest portraitists exhibiting in the National Gallery, so it is certainly not a matter of merely getting the shapes and shadows right.

With apologies for an unseemly comparison, Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart faced a similar conundrum when he tried to define what constitutes “hard core pornography.” To plagiarize: "I shall not today attempt further to define the kinds of qualities I understand to be embraced within a shorthand description of ‘essence’; and perhaps I could never succeed in intelligibly doing so. But I know it when I see it.”  

In summary, essence is the infamous Jell-O that cannot be nailed to a wall. We cannot confirm that Andy Warhol captured “the” essence of a Campbell’s soup can. All we know is that he captured something. Something notable, whether on canvas or in society or in the pure ether, and that is worth aspiring to. 

Some might quibble with the lack of object. Capture essence of what, exactly? But I like the mystery. I like the notion that essence might mean different things to different observers. If I paint a rose you might find essence in the rose itself or in a hundred other aspects of the finished painting. It is possible to paint a rose using a color no rose on earth has ever been, and capture essence nonetheless. Whatever essence you find today might be different tomorrow. Or the same, but more so.

Take a look at the painting depicting the Bon Air Victorian Day parade. I consider it to be a solid, well executed painting. I suggest that it captures essence, but of what? The old time automobile? The lovely Victorian home? Some indefinable Norman Rockwelly sense of nostalgia? Spring? Everything just mentioned? Something else? Does it even matter? 

No.

Because it is not a matter of definition. I have no doubt that as long as I keep at this I shall remain fully capable of producing paintings worthy solely of the reject pile whenever I paint blithely away without due consideration to a sense of essence in what I do. And that alone determines my mission as an artist to be:

To Capture Essence