No brushstroke, regardless of the color or shape, will ever be a pumpkin or a tree. It will always be a smear of paint on some surface. As an artist, you need to decide what makes that application of paint represent what you want to convey.

It is not always necessary to fool the eye (trompe l’oeil) into believing that this paint is an actual balcony or telephone. For some people, the test of a good painting is whether it can pass as a photograph. I heartily reject that criteria. I have a camera that can make something look exactly like a photograph in a fraction of a second. To make something look like a painting, painted by a human being, is something that artificial intelligence is now trying to emulate.

You and I (assuming you, my dear reader, are human), have the ability to produce human art simply by dipping our brush into the paint and applying it to our surface of choice. It really requires no talent, human. It only takes action. It takes doing. You can make a mark. A handprint. A line.

And you will have left a record of your presence.

Some paint smearers are applauded for the precision of the shapes, colors and values in the paint they leave behind. You can learn from what they did, as you can learn from anything. What matters is what soaks so deep into you that it comes out again in the way you smear paint or make mud pies or draw on your cave walls with sticks from the fire.

Because someone else did something beautiful doesn’t mean your voice is less. There is so much more to be said. So much more to be thought about, and so much more to be expressed.

Trust your voice to know what to say, and trust your hand to know how to say it. I believe we were formed to do this. To look up at the night sky, or out across the water and see something far bigger than us. Pondering how small we are, we come to realize, no.

We are part of this.