Untitled

Will South
36” x 36” • Oil on Canvas

Making art reminds me what a grain of sand—or less—I really am. Brush in hand, there’s this idea I should be going somewhere, that is, creating something. If working to get somewhere, anywhere, it sure would be nice to have a compass. Instead, there’s this knowledge that others have done all of this before and that I make art because others before me made it, here on this planet that is so impossibly inscrutable. I can ask myself: Well, what did all these past people achieve? A safer, more beautiful world, or one more cluttered with self-interest? It’s an impossible situation, standing before a canvas because I feel the grim weight of history, and, at the same time, feel the ongoing indifference of a universe so large that it, too, is impossible. Anything I could do in that moment of “now” feels miniscule or worse—unnecessary. And yet, somehow—I have no idea why—holding that brush feels like holding a lifeline, that I’m hanging on to something that matters, that someone is on the other end of this line, pulling me on. In that moment, I’m participating in something, putting in my tiniest of tiny two cents. I know we’re small, me and this canvas. But, for better and worse, we were part of it all, even if for just that moment. In the most infinitesimal of ways, painting feels like I touched the universe, and maybe that is the most one can do.