Hey, man! How’s it going?!
You know, your question is pretty far out there. It looks so simple, like a beginner artist just wanting to know what to paint, but when you really think about it, it’s deep, man. I mean, really think, especially after a quick smoke and some Doritos, like I did.
After all, part of being an artist is taking the mundane and making it vibrant and alive, to inject it with a little something to make the observer say, “Wow!” or “Hmmmm!” or “I gotta have some of what that guy is smokin’!” You want to get a reaction out of people, you know? So, it’s not about what are interesting things to paint, but how can you make anything interesting. That’s some Buddha stuff right there, man.
Look at Johannes van der Beeck’s famous 1614 still life Emblematic Still Life with Flagon, Glass, Jug and Bridle. Still life itself is all about painting some every day object, like a pear, or a teapot, or a candy blunt and trying to capture its soul, man. Sometimes you succeed, and sometimes you don’t, but it’s all a journey, right? You’ll get better, and next thing you know, you’re making people look at the light reflecting from jugs and flagons next to a scrap of sheet music. Awesome!
If fruit and glassware aren’t your things, that’s okay. You can paint squares! Really, dude. There was this guy named Piet Mondrian back in the early 1900s who painted black lines on white canvases and filled in some of the squares with bright colors. Crazy, right? But you can just stare at the paintings forever, like you are being drawn into the lines, man, and being pulled into the colors, and your whole vision is just overcome with the mood. Another painter named Mark Rothko took that one step further by removing the black lines and working with more flowing rectangular shapes. I mean, who needs restrictions, right? Take a drag, step back, and really look at a Rothko. You’ll see what I mean!
Sometimes, you don’t even have to make things and recognizable shapes interesting. Marcel Duchamp’s Nude Descending a Staircase No. 2 is an amazing piece of work that looks nothing like what the artist titled it, until the artist gave it the title, man! Whoa! It’s like a bunch of lines and shapes overwhelming your senses and then — bam! — you get hit with a hypnotic suggestion: You’re looking at a nude person on a staircase…. And then you are, man! I don’t know any drug that can get in your head that way, and, I should know, man.
Don’t forget, the media you use can make a painting interesting, too. Some people paint on canvas with oil paints, and others use acrylic on found paper, and still others use natural pigments on banana leaves. There are so many combinations to try. My latest works, for example, are on natural hemp paper I make myself in the back of my studio. Amazing stuff!
So, just get to doing art. Don’t wait for something interesting to inspire you to make a boring, slavish copy of it onto plain old paper, dude. Look around you, grab something nearby, and just light it up! A lot of artists do every day, and they paint some glorious stuff!
