​So the real question for me is, “Why may I not paint like this sometimes and other ways at other times?” Or even in different ways in the same painting! (I do that.)

May I?

Yes! Yes I may, and I refuse to give anyone the right to censure me for it.

At our book club meeting one night the discussion turned to characterization, which in the novel in question we disparaged as flat. We saw only one aspect of a person.

Being me, I woke next morning thinking about painting and after a while about how different some of my paintings are from others. Sometimes when several of my works hang together, one might conclude that they were not all the work of the same artist.

I have heard more than once that it is important to present homogeneous art. I have found that to be difficult, because some ideas ask to be realized in one way, others in another.

Literati on the written arts: We don’t like flat, single aspect characters.

Gallery industry and other art pundits: We like uncomplicated, single aspect artists.

There have long been artists who incorporate multiple styles and levels of completion in a single painting. And what’s good enough for El Greco is good enough for me.
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So please keep in mind that if an artist doesn’t employ one single treatment for every painting, it is quite likely that she* makes choices from among multiple capabilities, and the viewer has one more dimension of the artist’s character and message to enjoy.
 
*My solution to the indeterminate gender pronoun controversy is to default to the feminine. This is to signify that I have always viewed the use of “he” as implying nothing about gender politics, and choose now to view “she” in the same way. Since it does matter to some people, the truly even-minded writer should have no problem accommodating them. Those who cannot let go of the masculine bias really have no justification for it.
I find that the sprinkling of both gendered pronouns, supposedly equally throughout, shouts endorsement of gender politics—and what good does that do? In the same vein, I deplore the use of x, as in xe for s/he or any other solution that does not just graciously acknowledge that 2500 years of male dominance of pronouns is enough, and if we really believe it didn’t matter, it still shouldn’t.
You know what would be a truly lovely, loving solution? What if male writers used “she” exclusively and female writers used “he”?

Why do human beings make art?

A couple of years ago a friend sent me an article about rattlesnakes and hogs. Supposedly hogs love to eat rattlesnakes, and when they hear a rattle they converge upon it with great enthusiasm. As a result, the writer warned, rattlesnakes have learned not to rattle, and now they are more dangerous than ever.

Really? How did that happen? Did the dead rattlesnakes somehow tell the living rattlesnakes what had happened to them, and caution them to stay silent? Or, more likely, did a rattlesnake observe a friend being attacked by pigs, and figure out that to stay alive it must lay low? And then did the snake slither off to counsel every other snake it could find?

Those are the only explanations for the education of rattlers I can think up. Maybe you can come up with a better one.

I have a different theory, much more plausible, presuming the story itself is true: Not all rattlesnakes rattle. Maybe the propensity to rattle is genetic. Anyway, the noisy snakes who live near pigs are no longer having noisy babies, because they are not having any babies, because they all got eaten!

The part of the folksy story that doesn’t work is the notion that snakes figured out that rattling was dangerous and they stopped on purpose—i.e. that snakes form intentions based on inductive inference. But it is a common human fallacy to believe that things happen because the world chose a carefully considered action.

Not everything that happens in the world happens because someone or something had a thought-out purpose. Beware of teleological thinking. Phenomena have causes, but they don’t necessarily have reasons. There might be no thought-out purpose for the appendix. And whose idea was it for my hair to be thinning to the point of disappearing? Does that have some profound rationale? Maybe to keep hat makers in business? But then we can ask, what is the purpose of keeping hat makers in business? At some point that silly regress has to stop, because it gets ridiculous.

But hold on a second. There are many people who say everything happens for a reason. It is impossible to convince those people otherwise, so if you want to stop reading now, I don’t mind.

Does everything happen for a reason? If so, then some reasons are known only to God. But God is God, infinite, all knowing, all seeing, all powerful, and His reasons for things are far beyond our understanding.

As far as explanatory value is concerned, there is no difference between saying “Some things just exist for no purpose known to us,” and “Everything has a reason, but only God knows what that is.”

Human beings are makers. We just are. In prehistory our creative nature helped us survive and it still does, but it also helps us kill each other and lay waste to our world. We have no comprehensible reason for that. Making paintings springs from that same source. Creativity is an important part of being human and we all have those impulses; we just don’t express them in the same way.

So why do we paint? We can answer the question either of two ways:

We paint because we are just made that way, or

We paint because it pleases God, Who has His ineffable reasons.

Either way, we now know that if we feel like painting we can go ahead and paint without worrying that we are missing the real underlying reason for it. There is no reason that we will ever know.

Same for writing.