I started painting recently. No training. No plan. No gallery in mind. Just a brush, a stretched canvas, and a sense that something might happen if I let it. Almost immediately, I noticed something strange—not in the paint itself, but in the thoughts that came with it. The moment I shared what I was making, even casually, the quiet act of painting began to bend under invisible pressure. Will this be good? Should I post it? What does it mean? Could it sell?
It’s unsettling how quickly those questions arrive, like ghosts of a system I didn’t even mean to invite in. It seems we live in a time where creativity only feels valid if it’s visible. Art becomes performative. You’re expected to share every brushstroke, narrate your intention, offer prints, post progress reels, turn inspiration into inventory. Even sharing becomes a kind of sale. And every blank canvas starts to feel like a negotiation with an audience that doesn’t yet exist.
But I’m not interested in that. In fact, I think I started painting to get away from it. There’s a strange power in making something for no one. Something untrained, imperfect, and entirely free of utility. I don’t know what I’m doing, and that feels like the point. I paint layers and scrape them away. I mix colors without names. I use tools that weren’t meant for painting—rags, spatulas, fingers. Sometimes I stop working on a piece not because it’s finished, but because I’m no longer interested. And that’s okay. That’s allowed.
It feels like relief to make without aiming. I don’t want to create a brand. I don’t want a style guide. I don’t want to pretend this is leading to anything. I might sell some of my work one day, sure—but I will never create it to sell. There’s a difference. And I feel it in my gut.
I wonder what art would become if it didn’t have to answer to anyone. If no one needed to like or subscribe. If no one expected a drop date, a product line, a statement of purpose. Would we let ourselves make messier things? Uglier, truer things? Would we get lost more often—and let that be the goal?
The painting I’m working on now has a bird in it. Black silhouette, almost totemic. Inside it, a swirl of childlike drawings—eyes, zigzags, broken hearts, strange teeth. There’s a snake too, twisting its way up the canvas like a question I haven’t figured out yet. It might be about voice. It might be about force. It might not mean anything at all. I don’t think I care. It’s not for you. It’s not for sale. It might never leave this room.
And that feels honest.
Maybe the best things made today are being made in rooms like this one, by people not thinking about legacy or clicks—just following the old, human need to let something emerge. Maybe the real art of our time isn’t asking to be seen at all.