Evolved Painting

An artist, fed up with his Art not being Real, decided to work on only one painting for the rest of his life.

“The paint needs to come alive! It needs to be Real!” he shouted in his empty studio. The artist hadn’t seen another person for many days. Many of his friends and colleagues stopped visiting once he became cranky about Art.

He began painting his masterwork on that day. He stretched a square canvas and primed it with white gesso. The canvas was just a bit too large for his easel so he set it on a table to work on it flat. Rummaging through his art box, he selected 24 different colors of acrylic paint. He briefly remembered back to art school when he decided for no good reason that acrylic was better than oil. He couldn’t remember the reasons, but he’d only ever worked in acrylic since being a student. He also didn’t know why he chose 24 colors instead of, say, 13, or two. 24 reminded him of his childhood and choosing from a box of 24 crayons. The colors he chose weren’t crayon colors, but were familiar to him since becoming a painter. Colors like Cobalt Blue, Burnt Sienna, Phthalo Green, and Yellow Ochre. After nearly an hour he had 23 colors selected but needed one more. Reaching into his box he pulled one at random. It was Green.

“Just Green?” He asked himself aloud. “How will I know this Green from every other Green?” Pushing this philosophical dilemma aside, he set to work painting.

As always, he had no idea what to paint. His art training was not like the schools of the 16th century Old Masters. They would have a subject in mind, sketch the rough forms, add several layers of underpainting, and work in increasing amounts of light and shadow. No, he was trained in a school of Art which followed Abstract Expressionism. The act of painting and the canvas itself was the focus of Art! Perhaps this is why he felt cranky, he wasn’t sure.

Not knowing what to do, but confident in painting anyway, he started putting small dabs of paint on the white canvas. A few dabs of Burnt Sienna here, a few dabs of Cadmium Yellow there. The dabs never touched and never mixed. After a while he stepped back to look at his progress. He liked the painting but liked the individual dabs of paint even more. He made a pot of coffee and came back to look. He became more and more fascinated with each dab of paint.

“Look at this dab of Vandyke Brown here,” he said to himself. “It is like a little person, just living in my world being different. Certainly different from Alizarin Crimson. But look at this other dab of Vandyke Brown. It is over here but the same.”

He decided to create a system. First, he took out a notebook to write the Laws of the Colors. He decided that while every dab was unique, they followed the nature of their pigment. He wrote a rule for each of the 24 colors.

“Oh, I bet Burnt Sienna would like to move over just a little bit to the left if it could. And Cadmium Yellow here could move up just a smidge if it were able. And plain old Green… Green probably just moves down.”

With the laws established, he then needed to take a census. He created a specific index card for each individual dab of paint on the canvas. On the card, he wrote the color and its exact coordinates on the table. He soon discovered he had exactly 1,000 cards to track his 1,000 dabs of paint.

After hours of writing the census, he became bored. This boredom made him bored with the painting and he wished to start over. He took his white gesso and began to paint over the entire canvas, erasing his dabs of color. However, in his haste, he realized he didn’t gesso perfectly to the edges of the canvas. While the center was a white void, many random dabs of paint remained along the rim.

“You dabs of paint! How did you survive this? How are you so lucky simply because you are living on the edge? You must be something special!”

He sorted through his stack of 1,000 cards. He kept the cards for the survivors at the edge and threw the others away. There were hundreds of dabs of paint that survived among 20 colors. Four colors had not been near the edge; they were extinct.

The next day, after a night of rest, he decided to try again. He needed to fill the empty white center of the canvas back up to 1,000 dabs. But this time, he looked at the cards of the survivors.

“These were special dabs and deserve to leave a special mark on this canvas. They shall have children.”

He honored the instructions on the card for each dab that survived his erasure from the night before. Cadmium Yellow moved up just a bit; Burnt Sienna moved to the left just a bit. He filled the rest of the canvas with new dabs, but only using the colors that had survived. The survivors were the parents of the new painting. On very rare occasions he’d mess up and put the wrong color down—a mutation—but mostly, he followed the lineage. He made new cards for each of the 1,000 dabs before calling it quits.

At the end of the day, he realized his practice for this painting would be to erase the center each day, saving only the colors that reached the safety of the edges. To ensure he didn’t favor one side over another, he decided to rotate the canvas one quarter-turn every morning before he began. This was as good of an idea as any for an Abstract Expressionist practice.

He repeated his Art practice day in and day out. Each morning he would assess the survivors at the edge. Each afternoon he would fill the canvas with their offspring, moving them slightly according to their nature. Each evening, he would whitewash the center, killing everything that hadn’t reached the safety of the edge.

After about a year he noticed there were no dabs of paint in the exact center of the canvas from the day before; the colors were migrating outward faster now. After many more weeks he noticed he was only using about half of the colors from when he started. But he continued his Art practice.

Day after day, week after week he worked. Move the dabs the way they wanted, let them multiply, turn the canvas, then erase the center at the end of the day.

Many years later, when the Artist was an old man he looked at this painting. It was only Green dabs of paint, huddled perfectly at the edges. He looked from the graveyard in the center to the life at the edge. He ran his eyes and hands across it all and could feel it.

“This is Real,” he whispered.

He laid down in his studio, closed his eyes to sleep, and never woke up.