I just ran in the rain yesterday. Depending on the kind of rain it is, it’s really fun to do so. Yesterday wasn’t too bad. It was a nice breezy 58 degrees Fahrenheit, so it wasn’t freezing weather to be running in. I had fun jogging along getting wet until halfway through a flash of lightning cut across the clouds. That was when I realized that it was that kind of rain… the kind of rain I reaaaallly shouldn’t be running in. At that point, I was already halfway through. To turn back around would be pointless, so I just kept running my route.
Needless to say, I made it back alive without getting harmed by a single bolt of lightning. But this article really isn’t about my running activities… this article is really about this painting I made back in 2013;
This was a painting I made for Painting with a Twist… technically sort of. Around the time I made this, Painting with a Twist was holding an internal contest of sorts to see if their teachers (which was me) can come up with a painting to add to the companies’ roster of paintings. This was one of about three or four paintings I came up with for that event. I don’t remember if I ever submitted the entries I made. In all honesty, I wasn’t truly inspired to make the paintings. Why I even entered/attempted to enter the contest I’m not sure. I don’t really remember my line of reasoning back then. Maybe I was just being a “team player” I guess.
Anyways… my whole point is that the kite flyer in my painting isn’t really a smart cookie… like how I wasn’t a smart cookie yesterday. I’ve been pondering my line of thought when I was making this painting. For the life of me, I can’t think of why I painted a kite flyer when the scene is stormy (or at least full of heavy clouds). Was I trying to make a statement with the painting? Cause I sure as heck could not remember… lol. The only thing I can assume is that I probably just wanted to paint a stormy scene, and I guess at the very last minute I decided to add the kite flyer just to add something else to the painting. Whether this was the case or I actually had an “active reasoning” for the kite flyer I do not know. All I know is that if I paint something with an “active reason” I am more than likely to remember the reason versus remembering a painting decision as a last-minute decision.
But more than anything else, what I really want to point out in this whole article is this really good point: sometimes I paint just because I want to paint something spontaneous… there is no real logic to it. I painted an object/scene/person simply because I thought it looked cool. More than likely this was the case in the “kite flyer” dude in the painting. I painted him simply because I thought it looked cool in the middle of the stormy scene. So yeah… don’t ever believe the hype that art critics/historians/psychoanalysts say… because I guarantee you more than half the time an artist would paint something because he likes it, not because he is going through PTSD or whatever mumbo jumbo art critics/historians/psychoanalysts come up with. Art is not truly as deep as most people would like to think it is. Sometimes art is just simply “what’s cool.”