As I think I’ve said, I enjoy drawing and painting very much, and it makes me sad that there aren’t more people who get into it as a pasttime.

From what I’ve seen, there are two things that kill off the would-be artist right away, long before they’ve had any way of knowing if they like what they’re doing or might produce something that they’d enjoy looking at in the future. The one-two punch when you start out is an initial lack of confidence in making marks on an empty canvas or piece of paper, followed by harsh self-criticism of whatever marks you make. So the internal dialog goes something like:

1. Agh! It’s so white. It’s just completely blank and if there’s going to be anything there, I’m going to have to put it there. Okay. All right. Don’t panic. Make the smallest, tiniest, lightest marks you can and see if you can manage not to screw this up.
2. No. No. NO! That’s all wrong. Those four marks don’t look anything like a tree. You’re an idiot. You have no class. You should leave this kind of thing to trained professionals like Thomas Kinkade. Put that brush down before you kill someone.

With all that going on in the first two minutes, it’s no wonder that drawing and painting seem like more of an exercise in self-flagellation than creativity.

Apparently, Winston Churchill felt the same way. I’ve just come across an article in an old Weekly Standard (Link HERE, but you might have to register to see it), and though Churchill eventually came to say “If it weren’t for painting, I could not live,” he apparently had to overcome the same challenges as every new artist. I thought the passage below might offer a bit of help not only on how to face a white canvas, but how to get on with every new challenge.

Having acquired easel and colors, he describes his first timid steps in front of the canvas: “The palette gleamed with beads of color. Fair and white rose the canvas, the empty brush hung poised, heavy with destiny, irresolute in the air. My hand seemed arrested by a silent veto.”

But noting that the sky was a pale blue, he proceeded gingerly to load a “very small brush” with blue paint and, then, “with infinite precaution made a mark about as big as a bean on the affronted snow-white shield. It was a challenge, a deliberate challenge; but so subdued, so halting, indeed so cataleptic, that it deserved no response.”

At this point, the wife of his neighbor, the painter Sir John Lavery, arrives in his driveway in her car. She sees his hesitation, resolutely grabs a large brush and inflicts “several large fierce strokes and slashes of blue on the absolutely cowering canvass.”

And lo, “No evil fate avenged the jaunty violence. The canvass grinned in helplessness before me. The spell was broken. The sickly inhibition rolled away. I seized the largest brush and fell upon my victim with Berserk fury. I have never felt any awe of a canvass since.”

For the record, the Churchill painting at top recently sold at Sotheby’s for a record one million pounds.