Why paint? Why make art at all?

Making art is costly in time, material, and intellect. Making art isolates the artist from the consumer world because you are too poor to participate. All your money goes into the making of art. The manufactured goods available frustrate an artist, wanting to make something better than what is seen in stores. Stores like Wal-Mart are the museums of current culture, defining the age we inhabit by the products consumed. It is easier to buy the products to define oneself than to create something uniquely yours from almost nothing. Ah, the starving artist, it’s not as great as it sounds.
It is easier to think of art as a thing or finished product rather than the raw materials or procedured struggle creating it. Actually the ‘procedured struggle” is the best part, the fun part. Art happens when the painting is started. When “finished” it joins the scads of other manufactured objects that hang on the walls of our collective environment.
The joy creating art was in conception, not christening. At that moment a painting becomes a commodity, becomes “art.” The priceless stuff of national galleries or the rubbish by the street discarded by disaffected art students. This puts the “art” in “artifice.”
Why be an artist? You are congratulated on your arrival and harassed on your journey.
The very act of creating a painting is creating abstraction. If the painting is “representational” or a depiction of some thing or even as seen through a “window,” it is representing emotion, past or present coming through an emotional point of departure, filtered through the intellect and passed to the hand by way of the eye and back again. It is still a 2D painted abstraction of 3D environs. It is painted from memory or viewed from life and set down in paint as emotion dictates aesthetics. The artist has created this little world for all to see and now must stand by it. The viewer is sympathetic or not. Who cares?
Also, there is what we call “abstract painting.” It is a surface marked with paint, and is a painting because it is made of/with paint. It is an object in itself, taking on sculptural concerns of being a thing taking up physical space. In abstract painting the artist supplies the labor and reasons for creating, the viewer supplies the intellect and emotion. At that point, who cares? Abstract painting deals primarily with aesthetics and is “safer” for the artist than representational painting, putting the responsibility on the viewer. The representational painter lays his heart on the line, playing with psychological content and symbolism. Gambling with all the chips. Representation isn’t better than abstraction, the criteria are merely different.
There is nothing more boring in painting than “safe” representation or “daring” abstraction.
Paint is beautiful. Paint doesn’t need you. It looks great sitting on the palette or in a can. Liquid chromatic potential. Its beauty invites you to touch it, but you probably shouldn’t because it is poisonous. It is seductive.
Poetry is made of words and paintings are made of paint.