Why Painting Makes Life Better

Why are you painting?

Correct answer: Why not?! We tend to focus on technical stuff – draftsmanship, composition, color, values but not the human stuff – emotions, moods, meaning, energy, joy. But painting is all that – it’s joyful! – and fulfilling in itself. If the point is to live a fuller and more joyful life, art’s got your back – because art in itself is the trace of a life well lived, and who doesn’t want to live a life more full of creativity and joy?

However, should your art become a career, you’ll soon find yourself running a business, with all of the mundane worries and anxieties that implies. You’ll be thinking about your “brand,” or your social media marketing plan, the cost of materials (and frames!!), whether this or that artist is succeeding faster or harder than you, and how on earth you’re going to handle tax time as a sole proprietor.

But you will also remember from time to time that making art, like singing, dancing, or feeling grateful for being alive, is just one of those things that happy humans do.

Painting “because you like to paint” is everything – All You Need is Love!

Brenda Boylan, Starting Light, pastel, 14 x 14 in.

And the best part is that making art makes you a happier person. We all know it, but there’s hard science on it anyway. In research into improving public health, British scientists surveyed more than 70,000 about their wellbeing.

And (of course) the results (after accounting for multiple variables and margins of error) revealed that “people who engaged with creating arts and crafting had greater ratings for happiness, life satisfaction, and feeling that life was worthwhile than those who did not,” which no doubt directly or indirectly reflects physical health. The headline of one article about this said, “Arts and Crafts Give Greater Life Satisfaction than Work, Survey Suggests,” to which all I have to say is, “Duh!”

Creativity clearly isn’t just a function of happiness, rather it helps create it. Creative flow is a joyful experience, an expression of the inherent joy and freedom at the core of living, something we all too seldom get to lean into.

Brenda Boylan, Built Up, pastel, 12 x 12 in.

We get too many messages that the key to happiness is having “more stuff” or “nicer things” than the next person, that life’s about “productivity,” competition, keeping up with the Joneses. A person is supposed to prove how good he or she is at something by being better than someone else. But that’s not what it’s about at all.

“Let us remember,” says writer Christian Witman, “that in the end we go to poetry (or painting, music, literature or any other art) for one reason, so that we might more fully inhabit our lives and the world in which we live them, and that if we more fully inhabit these things, we might be less apt to destroy both.” (My parentheses.)

Being creative inspires the desire for more of itself- and more life! – generating more future creativity and joy and life and so on.

The journey is full of lessons if you are up for the challenge, the reward comes in moments of freedom and success of expression along the way.

The journey is about the freedom of experimentation without fear of judgement and failure, which requires inspiration, learned skills and the ability to suspend reality in order to create something new.

Brenda Boylan, Decatur Style, pastel, 14 x 11 in.

Creativity isn’t just a function of happiness, it helps create it. Creative flow is not only a joyful experience – it’s an expression of the inherent joy and freedom at the core of living an open life. Being creative inspires the desire for more life and more of itself, generating more future creativity and so on.

At some point as you get deeper into it, you might begin to wrestle with various technical and philosophical “problems,” most of which each artist must solve for themself. At the time it doesn’t seem like it, but these are there to keep things from getting boring. Part of the joy of creativity is beating the odds – the feeling of accomplishment has to do with meeting challengers and beating the odds. These are just a few of the way that painting invites us to “more fully inhabit our lives” – and why not?

Brenda Boylan, Shoreline Shadows, pastel, 24 x 24 in.

Featured in this edition of Inside Art, artist Brenda Boylan’s approach to creativity stems from an investigational curiosity. “I embrace my art-making like a child without boundaries,” she says, “while pushing and pulling color with theoretical playfulness. The joy of stretching rules allows new ideas to flourish while color, composition, and intention are held tight. My process allows immense freedom while artistic principles hold me in line. What if? Why not? How fun!”

Her fine art is represented and available online through Illume Gallery of Fine Art online, DragonFire Gallery, and Art Elements Gallery located in beautiful wine country of Newberg, OR.

Brenda has an inclusive sou-to-nuts video teaching the essentials of pastels available here.

And don’t miss Pastel Live! It’s three days of learning from 25 of the world’s best pastel artists, and it’s coming soon – September – 20, 2924. Learn more here.