An artist friend of mine, Ann Needham, once said something that’s been stuck in my head ever since:
“The longer you paint, everything you love, loathe or want to hide about yourself you’ll meet face to face on the canvas.”
It’s one of those lines that sounds poetic at first…
and then quietly whacks you in the side of the head.
Because it’s true.
Painting (at least the way I paint) has nothing to do with technique or style or whether the colours “go.” It’s a confrontation. A mirror. A slow excavation of things you didn’t even know were buried.
Most people think art is about expressing yourself, but often it’s about discovering what’s actually there when you stop performing.
When you stop painting the version of yourself you prefer, and end up painting the version you’ve been avoiding.
You can’t hide from the canvas.
Every unresolved frustration, every insecurity, every stubborn bit of ego all finds its way in through the brush. Not in symbols or metaphors or clever little marks… but in the tension between what you want to make and what your hand makes anyway.
And it works in the opposite direction too.
Everything you love, the small joys, the parts of yourself you never give enough credit, the fleeting moments of clarity they show up without asking your permission.
A canvas is the one place where your pretence gives up before you do.
The work reveals you to yourself.
You think you’re in control.
You think you know your story.
But the longer you paint, the more the truth leaks through. The truth about what you gravitate toward, what you sabotage, what you nurture, what you keep destroying and remaking and chasing.
Some days you meet a version of yourself you’re proud of.
Some days you meet the one you thought you’d outrun.
Both are necessary. Both are honest and both belong in the work.
That’s why showing up matters more than inspiration.
Inspiration is fickle. Showing up is where the real confrontation happens. Not with the canvas, but with yourself.
Painting becomes a practice of letting the truth slip out.
Not the curated or the brave-face truth.
The truth that sits under all of that.
Ann was right:
Keep painting long enough, and the canvas stops being something you work on. It becomes something you see through.
And eventually, if you’re very lucky (and very patient), it becomes something that sees back.