Why do I paint?

Why painting? Why oil? Why canvas? Why the figure?

Exercises are easy.

You have to do X, at this size, on this subject.

What is difficult is when we have to decide for ourselves what to do. Not only because of the creative challenge, but also, at least for me, because the work has to have a reason to exist.

I blame my rational mind, which has haunted me in a way since childhood. It led me towards decorative arts and crafts because, somehow, I could see a function in their existence. But they did not satisfy me.

So why did I decide to immerse myself in oil painting? Why did I choose to make figurative work? These are the reasons I give myself:

I accepted that it was not a rational choice. It simply made sense. It fit. I would not describe it as emotional, though. It was more an acceptance of what my body was telling me through the sensation of working with oil paint. Something clicked that had never clicked with anything else before. And perhaps, in the future, it will happen with other things too.

It was a pragmatic choice on a technical level, a path that gave me somewhere to start. There are "rules", and both in terms of materials and the market, there is an ease to it that other ways of working do not have from the outset.

It is commercially viable and easy to share, both in terms of visual documentation and the public's understanding of the object.

It may seem rather unromantic to begin my studio notes with practical and commercial concerns. But what would be the point of hiding reasons that influenced my choices just to protect an image of artistic purity? We all have, or feel, practical limitations that we have to deal with. Besides, ethics is a fundamental value for me, so if the first point did not exist, the other two would never be relevant. And if I had any doubts about the integrity of my work, I would never discuss these matters. So what remains is the transparency and thinking of someone at the beginning of her path.

In any case, I do not find these reasons at all satisfactory as an answer to the question I am asking. The first comes closest, and it leads me to a hypothesis: the body knows before the mind, and this is connected to our senses and to sensitivity in general. This is what feeds the work I make as an artist: paying attention to the sensitive side of myself that makes choices I do not yet fully understand, or that, at least, I am not yet able to put into words.

Perhaps that is also why I feel this need to write things down. Not as a way of developing new work, but as a way of understanding the work I have already made.

I suppose this is a way of drawing knowledge from practice, of turning into something understandable what was not initially discovered through words.

So, for now, I do not have a definitive answer. I want these notes to accompany the process of everything I go on to develop and, perhaps, help me find answers to the questions that trouble me.