Every now and then I catch myself thinking, surely it’s meant to be easier than this.
There’s gotta be a more sensible way to make a living and someone, somewhere, has figured out a cleaner, more dignified path.
And yet here I am again in a studio. Staring at a half finished painting. Trying to build something out of thin air.
From the outside it probably looks insane.
I know architects who design multimillion-dollar buildings and sleep well at night.
Lawyers who invoice more in a week than most artists see in a year.
Engineers, accountants, developers whose work fits neatly into spreadsheets and schedules.
And strangely a lot of them spend the odd weekend walking through art galleries.
They stand quietly in front of paintings. Step back. Linger.
They look for something their world doesn’t give them.
Most careers are built on certainty.
You learn the rules. Follow the process. Apply the formula.
You get paid.
Art doesn’t work like that.
Art starts with nothing.
No brief or guarantee.
No market and no applause.
Just an empty surface and a question:
Can you make something that didn’t exist before?
Some days the answer is I don't know.
Some days it’s maybe.
And once in a while, it’s that yes keeps you coming back.
The irony is that the people with the most structured lives are often the most drawn to art.
Because art is the opposite of their world.
It’s irrational, unnecessary and inefficient.
It refuses to justify itself.
A painting doesn’t solve a problem.
It just exists.
And in a world obsessed with productivity and outcomes, that’s radical.
There’s a strange addiction in starting something from nothing.
The moment before the first mark.
The moment before it all goes wrong.
The moment when anything is still possible.
It’s terrifying.
And it’s intoxicating.
Once you’ve tasted it and once you’ve felt what it’s like to bring something into existence that only you could have made, normal work starts to feel… thin.
Predictable. Polite and safe.
And safety has never been the point.
I keep going because I don’t know how not to.
Because building something from nothing is still more interesting than maintaining something already built.
Because the risk, the uncertainty and the struggle is the work.
Because somewhere, right now, there’s an architect or a lawyer or an accountant standing in a gallery, staring at a painting, wondering what it would feel like to live on the other side of certainty.
I already know. It feels like this.
Messy. Unstable. Unreasonable.
Necessary.