What is a Hobby?

My long suffering wife, who (I believe) loves me as much as she can, said, "I think painting is a good hobby for you." As soon as I heard that word "hobby" it felt a little like I'd stepped on a shard of glass barefooted. Hobby? Is what I do a hobby?

Is what I do a hobby?

Does it matter? Why do I feel an aversion to the word?

The definition of a hobby is an activity or interest that is undertaken for pleasure or relaxation. The activity is done for pleasure and relaxation and not for financial gain. Obviously a hobby might produce something that can be sold, and money can accumulate, but the reason one engages in the hobby is not to earn a living, it is to enjoy living.

Often I tell people that when I paint I zone out, it is like medication, self-hypnotism, it creates in me a sort of Buddhist calm, and since I have been, for years depressed and stressed, it seems prudent for me to involve myself in some activity that clears my mind of distractions, and focuses me on the moment only. When I paint, I forget time. When I paint the television becomes a talking lamp, the coffee in my cup goes untouched and grows cold. I work a late shift so I set the alarm on my cell phone to go off at 1:45 pm. This reminds me to stop painting and get ready to go to work. Without the alarm I could easily be late to work. When I paint, time ceases to exist, or at least time ceases to matter.' When I paint what matters is the painting.

Sometimes friends will ask me to paint something particular. Often they want a portrait of their dog, or a likeness of their dead mother. I have stopped taking such commissions. I've done it in the past and sometimes I've been successful, and sometimes not. The thing is, if I take a commission then suddenly I have to paint something that pleases someone else, someone who likely has a preconceived idea of what they want. 

My father recently asked me to paint a portrait of my dead mother.  I did it because he is my father.  He gets what I would not do for others because of his position in my life.  When it was done, I emailed him a picture of the picture.  His reaction was, "You made her look old and ugly.  Surely you could have found a better photo to work from."  

I have tried to please my father for almost 62 years now, and every time I think I'm going to get that approval I get reminded of how inferior I am.  I was mad at myself.  Why did I do it?  I keep asking for a hug and I keep getting slapped in the face.  NEVER, never, never do art for someone else.  ONLY do art for yourself.  Stop being a baby, I tell myself.  You'll be 63 in October.  When are you going to stop being a little boy who wants a daddy that loves him, when?  The one, and only reason to do art, is because you enjoy doing art.  The approval of others can NEVER be good enough to justify the act of creating art.   

I have no problem having someone say, "I like that picture, how much would you take for it." The picture is done. If someone wants to buy something already done, something that appeals to them, then fine. At no point was that picture painted to please that buyer, it was painted because I wanted to paint it. If I have an order to fill then the benefits of painting is, for me, diminished.

Sometimes, once I have finished a painting, I'll look at it and decide it sucks like a vacuum cleaner. Because I am struggle financially, I will often decide to paint over the sucky picture with primer and try again. Why waste a canvas? Nevertheless, even when I paint a picture and feel my efforts have failed, I still benefited from the painting. I enjoy painting a bad picture as much as I enjoy painting a good picture. Of course I don't enjoy looking at a failed end product, the action of painting did not fail.

Again, this all sounds like what I do is a hobby. It sounds like I paint because it helps me, pleases me, relaxes me, and I don't do it to make money. So what's wrong with calling it a hobby?

I guess I have this assumption that something done for money is serious and something done for pleasure and relaxation is trivial. If what I do is considered a hobby by other people then they are not going to honor my sacrifice of time on the altar of hobby.

When I looked at the origins of the word Hobby I found that the roots of the word go way back and are linked to our childhood toy, the hobby horse. Actually the toy's name goes back even further, perhaps to medieval days when a small horse (13 to 14 hands which is about 52 to 56 inches, or 130 to 140 centimeters) was bred for soldiers called Hobelars. The HOBBY was the name given to these small skirmishing horse. Since that horse was small, it made since to call the child's toy horse, a Hobby Horse. The Hobby Horse could actually be ridden, and it was fun to ride, but it took you nowhere. In a similar way our hobbies are real activities, they are fun to do, but the fun, and the doing is the purpose of that activity.

Well, maybe the purpose of my painting is not getting rich and famous, but it is more than a hobby to me. I need another category. I need to find another term. There are, I guess, passive hobbies and obsessive hobbies. What I do matters to me, and people who care about me MUST honor my devotion to painting. If you want to have a relationship with me, then part of me is my need to paint every day. (I also write every day, and I need to paint or draw every day.)

Yes, I miss days sometimes. When my son got his PHD at Princeton, my wife and I flew up there and spent 4 days with him. I didn't paint. I did bring a sketch pad, and I did sketch when I had time, but I didn't paint. I will still go shopping with Kathie, and make trips to the grocery store. I still mhave chores. I am not demanding that ONLY my needs matter. While Kathie has a relationship with me, I also have a relationship with her. I honor what matters to her.

I just hate calling what I do a hobby. I've read that Vincent Van Gogh only sold one painting during his life time. Does that mean Van Gogh was just a hobbyist painter? Painting is part of who I am, and that means the value of painting is linked to my value as a human being.

PAINTING IS AN INVESTIGATION OF BEING.

I don’t make a lot of money. Compared to most of the world I’m rich, but I’m entangled by the trappings of Western civilization. I have two vehicles, a house, with payments, and high medical expenses that will only stop when I do. For this reason, I am a cheapo when it comes to my art supplies. For example, I don’t buy tubes of watercolor or acrylic paint. I buy those little bottles of craft acrylic paint. Is that wrong? I am told that the quality of the pigment and the acrylic binders are best with tubes of paint, but how much better? Will the tube paints cause a painting to last 500 years, while the craft acrylic paint will last only 400 years. A tube of acrylic paint may cost me $4.00 and if I wait for a sale I can sometimes get a bottle for 48 cents.


I varnish my paintings using acrylic varnish, but instead of buying a jar of Liquatex Acrylic Varnish I get the stuff they sell at Home Depot or Lowes. I get about 4 times more varnish for about the same cost.


If I have a gift card I’ll buy canvas at the local arts and craft store, but if I have to pay out of my pocket I get a bucket of gesso and a sheet of hardboard. I cut the hardboard to size. I put one coat of gesso on the sanded smooth side, and then I use water based primer to put enough coats on the hardboard to make it white.


I’m told that I am just not taking the care to ensure my work is going to last.


This cheapo thing I’m doing has many advantages for me AND it conforms to my outlook on life.


THE ADVANTAGE


The advantage is that if the materials are cheap, I can afford to paint more. I don’t believe my work is going to be treasured by the future beings, and I’m not painting for them. My desire is to paint.


I have a friend, Richard Montgomery, now a philosophy professor in West Virginia, but 40 years ago we were in a creative writing class together. Richard wrote a story about an artist painting a picture. The majority of the story is about the intensity of his focus as he created this picture. At the end of the story the artist sees the whole work, he is pleased with his efforts. The next thing the artist does is burn the painting. Why? Because the importance is creating art is the creating, not the admiration of the piece after it is done. That story has never left my mind.


Early in my life my family admired creativity, but the focus was in having the completed work. The stress was for the work to last beyond our own lifetime. The purpose of creating a picture, or a poem, or a novel is to have that finished product last longer than the artist lasts. The emphasis was on leaving a trace of one’s existence.


Early in my creative life I bought that pile of horse hockey, so I got protective and possessive of everything I created. Later I noticed that my focus on making stuff for posterity was keeping me from working every day. I had to make some choices:

• Do I want to have been an artist, or do I want to be an artist right now?
• Do I want the title, or do I want to paint pictures?
• Do I want to talk about writing, or do I want to write?
• Am I a wisher, or a do-er?

MY OUTLOOK ON LIFE


I believe that someday, life on earth will end. Some day our planet will resemble Mars. I believe that all art will deteriorate eventually. The question is not will an art work last, but how long will it last. The lasting forever is not one of the choices. There is a point where every work of art will crumble into dust.


No artist can know how long his work is going to last, will it be admired, treasured, preserved. Leonardo DaVinci probably painted hundred’s of pictures, but only a handful have been preserved. If posterity is what matters to you, then you are not an artist you’re a narcissist. Because I believe that in time every trace of me will be dust, my focus is in the creating. I can do the creating with cheap materials. I have no fear that my work is going to crumble and fade during my lifetime. My work is going to out last me. I feel certain it will last as long as it needs to last.


I have a brother that tells me he likes my work. I have given him half a dozen paintings. Recently I learned that he re-gifted most of them. I have another brother who accepted paintings, claimed to like them, but, when I went to his home I noticed my work was no where to be seen. I gave a close friend a large watercolor that I spent $100 to frame, and he hung it in the junk room of his house. It hangs on a wall and is enjoyed by the ironing board, and stored Christmas decorations.  Recently I got an email from a university in Florida.   The Florida person wanted to know if I had painted a picture she had recently purchased from Goodwill.  She sent a picture of what she had, and yes, it was one of mine.  I gave that picture to a co-worker.  They donated it to Goodwill.


I have very little reason to believe people are going to value my work. Some are polite and say that it is nice, but few people like it enough to buy it. The thing is, I paint now. Now is when I exist. Now is what matters. And my NOWs are enhanced by the act of doing some creative work. After that, well, I just don’t have a clue.

The Centaur is Me

This was a picture that wasn’t working for me.  I’d set it aside. 

Now I don’t frame most of my paintings.  I paint too many of them and make too little money to be framing paintings.  Somehow this lady I work with figured I wasn’t framing my paintings because I didn’t realize they look better in frames.  So Diane asked if I had anything she could frame just to show me.  She buys frames at garage sales and thought she would have something to put on a painting and then I’d see and WAH-LAHHHH I’d start framing my stuff. 

It turns out Diane didn’t realize that frames and paintings come in different sizes.  I figured I’d get her preoccupied if I just gave her something to piddle with, so I gave her this painting that was unfinished and not working for me.

A couple of weeks later she brought my picture back to me.  She didn’t have any frames the right size.  So I figured I’d just prime over the work and then I’d have another canvas to paint on, and I was taking the picture back to my truck when another young cute girl stopped me and asked to see it.  She went wild for the picture.  I thought, well, it’s a piece of crap to me but if she wants it, let her have it.  So I gave this 20-somthing   young lady the painting.

Later it started to bother me.  The picture wasn’t finished.  She wanted me to sign it, and I didn’t want to sign it if it was unfinished.  So I offered to take the picture back and finish it up.

She said swell.  Well the gulf oil spill was[and is] going on, and I added a little oil slick to the centaur’s body map.  I made Oklahoma stand out since we are trapped here in Oklahoma.  It still wasn’t what I’d hoped, but it was more finished, the edges were defined, the colors were dressed up and the whole thing was given several coats of acrylic varnish. 

PAINTING IS AN INVESTIGATION OF BEING.

Portarit of my mother.

The chicken with a big heart

A folk art portait of Tucker

This is collage on canvas, some cut scrapbook paper, some magazine pages, on a 16 by 20 stretched canvas.