The Half of It and “The Great Painting”
“I had a painting teacher once tell me that the difference between a good painting and a great painting is typically five strokes. And they’re usually the five boldest strokes in the painting. The question, of course, is which five strokes?”
- Aster Flores, The Half of It
In the past couple of weeks, I’ve been thinking a lot about this concept of “The Great Painting.”
About making your bold strokes to make or break a good painting. About being willing to risk whatever you have that’s already convenient, for a chance at achieving an even higher level of satisfaction. There’s nothing wrong with a good painting, but is it really the one you’d be willing to settle for?
And then I started to question a lot of things.
How could you tell when it’s time to stop? How could you know when there’s nothing left to do with a good painting that you’ve successfully turned into a great one? How could you know when you’re done with it, that it’s time to move onward and get started on another great painting? How could you know that the best is yet to come?
All it took for me to get the answer was to take a step back and see things in a bigger picture.
Imagine attending an art exhibition by your favorite painter. Will they just have one single painting on display? Chances are they’d have at least several paintings to show. One might not be as magnificent as the other, but it doesn’t close the chance that every single one of it might just be equally magnificent in their own specific way.
It’s the same case with a song album, a book, a movie. The artists don’t just stop with a song, a chapter, a scene.
And if we choose to take that extra step back…
We’ll see that a lot of great artists, in their lifetime, wouldn’t just hold one single art exhibition. They wouldn’t just make one album, hold one concert, write one book, or make one movie, and that’s it. They get addicted with the thrill of creating something out of nothing, so they brave the next step: Leaving a finished work as they’re done with it to breathe life into a new one. They make a lot of great arts throughout the course of their lives. Not every single one of it is their greatest work, but they can still be great, nonetheless.
This time, I’ve come to the realization that we all have enough time in our lives to make more than just one great painting.
Whatever great painting we’re done with, it tells us that we’re ready to get started on a new one. Maybe our best one yet. And if it’s not our best one yet, rest assured that we are allowed to take all the time and space we need to create the painting we deem as our greatest one.
To achieve our greatest painting, we’ll need to know when it’s time to stop fiddling around with the one that’s already done.
We’ll need to have the resolve to stop adding unnecessary strokes just to buy ourselves some time in order to avoid getting started on the new one. We’ll need to face the truth that we’re not ready to leave the painting that we’ve already put so much of ourselves into, because we’ve grown so familiar and comfortable with it. We’ll need to take our fear by the hand, to hold it as we walk together side by side facing the new blank canvas, as we reassure it that this new page is where it can freely be itself, or transform into whatever shape it may want to take.
The prospect of having to face a blank canvas is admittedly terrifying.
Having to leave what’s comfortable to go through the hustle and messiness of finding our pace, our tone, our color, ourselves all over again is a painful process. But if we choose look at it from a different perspective, it’s a brand new chance to reinvent ourselves, to be whatever we want to be this time around. To be whatever we feel is right for us for the time being.
I refuse to believe that there’s anyone in this planet who’s only meant to be just one single thing, to create just one great painting.
I hope we find the boldness in ourselves to take as many canvases as we need, to keep making those bold strokes over and over again in every single one of our painting, and not to stop at just one great painting.
We all have a lot more inside of us.
