Walking In

What made me an artist again? I was happy, actually. That’s the twist. I was working for a family restaurant chain, running operations, and enjoying it. Strict. To the point. All the things.

Then the lockdowns came, one after another, and I could feel people going numb. You could almost hear it, a country-wide hum of televisions in dim rooms. Isolation creeping in under the doors like cold air. The light going out of people the way a pilot light goes out in a draughty house, quietly, and nobody notices until the water runs cold.

I thought: I can’t let that happen to my family.

It started, like all great art movements, with my brother trying to impress a girl.

I hadn’t painted in years. But he needed to impress this girl, so out came the paint, and we painted. And somewhere in my late twenties it hit me, hard, a bucket of cold water over the head: I’d built a disguise, a whole guise of a man, and it was ick. I love painting. I love singing. I love dancing. I like being silly and geeky. And suddenly I was starving for expression like a man who’d forgotten to eat for a decade.

Second lockdown. I set up a live stream so my brothers, scattered round the world, could paint with me. I left it on public. That was the mistake. Arguably one of the best things I’ve ever done.

I was setting up a restaurant after a lockdown, before heading back to head office in the North Island. I’d finish around nine at night, pack everything away, make myself a cocktail, put my headphones on and wander out to the storage shed. Four or five hours of paint. A small part of me didn’t want those moments to disappear. I wanted them to live a little longer, like a candle you cup your hand around.

I’d always thought painting was selfish. Something I did for me, in the dark, for my own sanity. I had to get slapped over the head before I saw it differently.

As a kid I dreamed about Picasso and Van Gogh. I’d stare at their work and their lives, wanting to be them, and quietly filed the whole thing under pipe dream.

It took incredible people to grab that pipe dream by the ear and drag it out into daylight. If strangers hadn’t felt happy, and demanded more, I’d be in another job right now, ignoring a whisper a five-year-old started. That kid would grin like an idiot if he saw what his craft does for people. His grin, and the people on the other end of the canvas, are the fuel. When I look at a canvas that way, it stops being about me at all.

Let me be honest, though. I’m floundering. I have no idea what I’m doing. This is a journey reviewed in hindsight, and I’m selling you the romance. Take the romance. It’s real. Just know there was mud under it.

In the early days I attacked canvas with no plan. Raw shapes, hues and wild ideas running feral across the surface like a mob of unbroken horses. I love every one of those works. I’d step back and wonder whether anyone else would see what I saw. To an onlooker: insanity. To me: the corner of a diamond poking out of the dirt. I couldn’t stop scraping.

Nobody was watching. Just the people who loved me, saying things like, “Keep going. That’s kinda funky,” and, “You’re a better person right now. Keep doing what you’re doing.” Were they talking about the art or about me? I still don’t know. Does it matter? In that soft little room I carved a method. Colours, strokes, expression, until it turned into something other people could stand in front of and feel.

Then the love came in from every direction, like the tide coming in over a flat beach, quiet and enormous. Every new person touched by a painting is a gift. The passion you feel looking at one is the same passion it was painted with. That’s not mysticism. You can see a happy stroke. You can see a frightened one.

A happy ending, but only after a scrap. Here are the juiciest wrong turns. No wallowing, no bragging.

I didn’t know what to charge. I was so excited someone saw the same beauty I did that I’d literally hand them the work and say, “I really like you. Have it for free.”

I’d take a commission and then crumble, sure they’d hate it, and drag the painting out for months to dodge an embarrassment that was never going to arrive. Fear is a slow painter. It does one stroke a week and calls it caution.

One more thing, and I want you to take this one personally. Maybe you’ve got a job on the side. Maybe you’re a plumber, maybe you drive a taxi, maybe you wait tables. It feels weird to say you’re an artist. You say, “I dabble.” That’s fear of judgement wearing a polite little hat.

Take the hat off. Stand up in front of people and say it: I sing. I dance. I make art. That should be a thing of pride.