Michael Jinkins

Standing, facing a canvas on which I had been toiling for days, I was convinced of only one thing: I had forgotten how to paint. 

True: before me was a well constructed, massive canvas, exactly the sort I love most.

True: the canvas was competently primed, the background structure was sound.

True: for two days I had been applying oils mixed with cold wax to the canvas convinced that the original concept of the painting, its form, its rhythms, its layering of colors, was good.

True: I stood in a studio full to brimming with paintings I had previously painted in which I was well pleased. 

But, this painting simply wasn’t taking shape as I thought it should. It felt hopeless. I was alone in my rented studio, pacing, stealing glances at the painting, unable even to look it in the eye, so convinced was I that it was a pig’s breakfast of failed intentions.

 

I called my wife, Deborah, also a painter. “I’ve forgotten how to paint,” I said. 

“Oh, so you’re at that stage on this one, are you?” She replied. I could visualize the wry smile on her face. We’ve said much the same to one another so often. I had entered that point in painting a new work where mystery overwhelmed all other capacities. 

Indeed, the artist’s vocation as a whole is as shrouded in mystery as that of any priest or shaman. It drives us. It draws us. It beckons us in our sleep like the Hebrew prophets of old. It makes us do apparently crazy things like those ancient Zen hermits who haunted solitary mountains in search of enlightenment. It makes us whirl like dervishes only to leave us sitting for hours staring into air as thin as Tibet’s. It demands that we master crafts, techniques, materials, that we bind ourselves to disciplines and indenture ourselves to teachers. It is a calling, to use a proper word. It has its own rituals, its saints, martyrs, zealots, and heretics, and its holy relics. 

I once heard someone say that a “calling,” a “vocation,” in the spiritual sense of the word, is “a means of salvation.” Through the disciplines of a calling we become the sort of creatures we were intended to be. An old Presbyterian preacher I once knew said that “God can only save some people by making preachers of them.”

Well, then, maybe artists standing before their canvases are just working out their own salvation “with fear and trembling,” as the Bible says. 

If this is all true, however, how is it possible to stand, as I did that day, dumbfounded and perplexed, facing a canvas sure that I had forgotten how to paint? 

I recall something I once read. W. H. Auden, one of the greatest poets of the twentieth century, describing the vocation of poetry, spoke of the apprenticeship of a hypothetical young poet. Auden said: “We must assume that our apprentice does succeed in becoming a poet, that, sooner or later, a day arrives when his [internal] Censor is able to say truthfully and for the first time: ‘All the words are right, and all are yours.’” The young poet is thrilled, of course. He has succeeded in writing not just a poem, but a good poem. If he is honest with his soul, however, he must admit that the thrill is quickly gone, because he will soon ask himself, “Will it ever happen again?” 

Speaking with such disarming authenticity, Auden confesses his own doubts as a poet when he continues, “[The poet] will never be able to say: ‘Tomorrow I will write a poem, and thanks to my training and experience, I already know I shall do a good job.’” Certainly, Auden continues, in the eyes of others he is a poet if he has written a good poem. But in his own eyes, he may be a person who once wrote a good poem, but he is only a poet while making the very last revision to a new poem. “The moment, before, he was still only a potential poet: the moment after, he is a man who has ceased to write poetry, perhaps forever.”*

So, can we really speak of an artist’s vocation, so riddled with doubts and fears, so dependent on the moment, the episode? 

Yes, I believe we can, simply because of this: the next day, struggling with our doubts and fears and other assorted emotional clatter, we do return to that canvas. We are drawn back to that canvas, or driven back to it, and we will continue to paint. Amid whatever inner turmoil, an artist finds the courage to do what the vocation demands, and keeps on creating, because the vocation will let the artist do no less. 

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*W. H. Auden, “Making, Knowing and Judging,” in The Dyer’s Hand (New York: Vintage Books, 1989. This essay was Arden’s inaugural lecture as Professor of Poetry at Oxford University on June 11, 1956.