Making Happy Art: Tuesday Rambles: C.S. Lewis and Striving for Authenticity in Art

Recently, artist David Kassan, whom I follow on Instagram, shared an inspiring quote from the famous writer C.S. Lewis:

"Even in literature and art, no man who bothers about originality will ever be original: whereas if you simply try to tell the truth (without caring twopence how often it has been told before), you will, nine times out of ten, become original without ever having noticed it."

I found this quote quite inspiring, interpreting it as two things: the job of an artist is to tell some form of truth in their work, and the evolution of that truth through the work naturally leads to a greater originality, or what I would call authenticity. In other words, just be true to yourself and your vision, and keep working on your craft. The rest of it will come on its own.

Years ago, when I worked at an art magazine, I interviewed artist Kent Williams, whose work is what I would call bold and painterly. I naively asked him how his painting style evolved, and he said (I'm roughly paraphrasing), that style naturally evolves. It is not something planned or chosen. Like many great artists, Williams' paintings are identifiable at a glance as belonging to him, yet it would be hard to describe exactly what is in the art that makes it so. We as the viewer simply know through some combination of Williams' technique, composition and subject that the work we are looking at was done by the artist Kent Williams. That, to me, is truth in art, and in the artist's relationship to his work.

Similarly, if you've ever seen Kassan's portraiture work, you'll probably be able to discern that truth is indeed embodied in every piece he paints. The portraits are stark, emotional, and not traditionally flattering, instead showing every wrinkle and mark on his sometimes elderly sitters, many of whom were Holocaust survivors. As for the second part, his craft as a portrait artist is unsurpassed. The stronger his paintings in technique and composition, the more convincing the truth from the works becomes, and so it goes, back and forth, building on the other.

In college, my art professors discouraged the use of what they called "devices," the things we young artists thought were so clever in including in our works, either to create a style, pop a design, or to emulate a more famous artist. At the time, I didn't really understand why this was bothersome. Sometimes, I enjoyed seeing these "devices" in other students' works. Now, all these years later, having worked my way through many hundreds of paintings and developed a painting technique and vision that is wholly my own, I finally get it.

Working upside down on one of my large paintings.

Authenticity is, to me, both about what you make and how you make it. It took many years of painting, but I no longer try to be "clever" in my paintings. I don't copy other people, and I rarely use reference photos that are not my own. I want to be more than just a person who paints "things." Instead, I simply try to share my vision and create some kind of happy truth in my pieces.

I'm sure many people look quickly at my work and see that I paint a lot of ice cream and think, well, there's another ice cream painting. But if you look more closely, it is so much more than that, at least to me. It's not the cold sterility of photorealism. It's emotional; it's joyful. I spend hours sculpting and photographing my subjects for reference photos, and editing the images, and many dozens of hours on each piece using a very unique painting approach to convey the depth, colors and details that bring my pieces to life. I go beyond the reference photos, too, often putting them away for the final stages of my pieces, so I can just paint what makes the pieces feel more joyful and colorful, as well as more convincingly real. They aren't just still lifes to me; they are vehicles for connecting to moments of happy memories, thinking back on childhood or family. They are moments of innocence and joy when you have a giant ice cream cone in front of you and that is the only thing on your mind, not the worries of the other parts of your life. So, I will keep pushing to paint that elusive happy truth I'm trying to share with others.

While I continue to develop the ice creams, I have also been eking out a little time here and there to develop a painting series that honestly has been rolling around in my mind for the last couple of years, a natural progression for me as an artist on a mission to make happy art. It's not a forced thing; it's who I am. Every piece that I paint is a little bit of me and how I see the world. It will be some time before I share this side project, but it is something I feel really good about, and it is definitely all authentic to me.

I hope you can pull a little bit of your own inspiration from the C.S. Lewis quote above and incorporate into your life or your art. And if you do think I just paint ice cream, I hope you'll take a few minutes to see something a little more in it and that it will bring a few moments of happiness into your day. Thanks for stopping by!