All In The Mind

October 7, 2025


From the outside, the act of painting can appear remarkably still, quiet hands moving across canvas, a furrowed brow, the occasional pause to step back and squint. To the uninitiated, it may even seem dull, like watching someone solve a puzzle in slow motion. But this perception misses the truth entirely, because the real painting, the electric, turbulent, living painting, is happening in the mind of the artist. That’s where the storm brews. That’s where lines are argued with before they are drawn, where colour is felt long before it is mixed, where the canvas is already vibrating with form and emotion long before the first mark is ever made. The brush moves in the physical world, yes, but it is guided by something far deeper, by thought, by memory, by instinct, by imagination.

A finished painting is often admired for its composition, its technique, its mood, but these are just the surface, the visible echo of a hidden interior. What ends up on the canvas is residue. Not in a dismissive way, but as a trace, a fossil, a footprint. It is the evidence of something that happened invisibly and internally, something too vast and fast to be directly seen. Behind each brushstroke, there were hundreds of decisions, impulses, hesitations. Behind each colour choice, a memory, a mood, a moment. The artist leaves themselves behind in pigment and texture, in light and shadow. They are not painting what they see, they are painting what they feel, what they are.

When you stand before a painting, you are not simply looking at an image. You are standing at the edge of someone else’s mind. You are being invited to lean in, to try and glimpse the chaos and clarity, the struggles and revelations that occurred during its making. It’s easy to forget that, easy to consume a painting the way you might consume a photograph, forgetting that it is not merely an object but an event that has already happened. The real action, the story of its creation, unfolded quietly and invisibly, days or months ago, in the solitude of the studio and in the recesses of the mind.

This is what gives painting its power. Not just the skill, not just the beauty, but the humanity. The invisible labor of thought and emotion that has soaked into every layer. That’s what makes a painting linger in your chest long after you've walked away. You may not understand it rationally, but something in you recognizes that this is not just a picture. This is someone’s interior made exterior. This is the storm made still. This is the soul, mid-flight, caught in the act.