by an anonymous artist
A month has passed. The studio smells faintly of linseed oil and sunshine. The doubts I hung so neatly on the hook last time have not disappeared, but they’ve begun to dry around the edges, curling slightly like old newspapers in a Florence heatwave. And while I’m no closer to certainty, I find myself less agitated by its absence. Which, I suppose, is what we call progress.
Last month I asked whether art mattered. The question hovered like a fruit fly in a glass of wine: hard to ignore, impossible to remove elegantly. I’ve since had several emails, a few raised eyebrows, and one earnest postcard from someone in Devon urging me to “return to the joy of pure form.”
This month, a shift—not in grand conviction, but in tone.
I spent the past few weeks working on a piece I can’t yet name. It began, as most of my work does, with something not quite working. A canvas that had gone dry too fast, a composition that refused to settle, a shape that frankly, looked smug. I stared at it, it stared back. Eventually, out of exasperation more than inspiration, I painted a crooked line through the middle.
And there it was: not a solution, but a route.
There’s something deeply unfashionable about admitting pleasure in the process. It’s supposed to be about ideas —sharp, critical ones, preferably expressed in footnotes*. But I’ll confess: I like the feel of a brush dragging against linen. I like the moment when a surface surprises you, when colour does something it hadn’t rehearsed. These are quiet rewards. They don’t always photograph well.
But they do something.
And perhaps that’s the point, or at least a temporary holding place for the point. That in the making of something—something non-useful, non-profitable, non-logical—we assert, gently, that not everything needs a reason to exist. The process itself becomes a gesture of resistance. A way of saying: I am here, and I am paying attention, and that is enough for now.
I recently reread a bit of Agnes Martin, who said: “The value of art is in the observer.” I’d once thought this a lovely abdication of responsibility. Now I see it as generous. She trusted us to finish the work. To meet her halfway. It’s a good faith contract, and these days I find that moving.
Of course, this still doesn’t answer the original question: does art matter?
I remain unsure. But I’m beginning to suspect that it doesn’t have to matter in the loud, sweeping, history-will-remember kind of way. Maybe it just has to matter enough to the person who’s making it—and maybe only on that Tuesday evening when it was created. Maybe it doesn’t change the world, but maybe it makes certain days more bearable. Maybe that’s not everything, but it’s not nothing.
And maybe that’s where I’ll leave it. For now.
Until next month.
– The anonymous artist
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* Read Gibson’s Art of Today for more on this topic.