I hated this painting.
Which is probably not how an artist is supposed to begin a blog post about a painting that was viewed by more than 126,000 people on Reddit, went viral, sold almost immediately, and became my first international sale.
But I did.
I painted butter.
I was, and still am to some degree, in a strange place creatively. I don't have a model. I haven't been particularly overwhelmed with inspiration. I don't have some grand series burning a hole in my brain. I'm in that uncomfortable space where I know I need to paint, but I don't necessarily know what I want to paint.
And as Liz Smith taught me, the only way out of that place is to paint anyway.
So I've been painting objects.
I arbitrarily chose butter.
I wanted it to be melty.
That was about as sophisticated as the concept was.
There was something about the subject that appealed to me, though. If I have any inspiration right now, it's probably this fascination with the insignificant and the fleeting.
Butter is about as insignificant as it gets.
It sits in the refrigerator. You use it. It melts. Eventually, it's gone.
And I spent a ridiculous number of hours trying to preserve it.
The irony wasn't lost on me.
Unfortunately, neither was the painting.
I hated it.
Part of it was boredom. Part of it was the color palette. I kept finding myself wandering into muddy territory with the colors, and the more I worked on it, the less interested I became in looking at it.
At one point, I seriously considered starting over.
And then I did.
I completely removed the color from the butter, leaving only the wrapper where it had been at that stage.
Probably seven hours of work, erased.
Gone.
Not because I had some brilliant new insight, but because I thought I had a better chance of getting the color right if I was willing to throw away what wasn't working.
This is one of the strange things about making art for me. I have a terrible time giving up on things, but I also have a terrible time finishing them.
Those two things together are surprisingly effective at ensuring that absolutely nothing gets finished for months.
So eventually, I just had to finish the butter.
There wasn't a magical moment where everything clicked.
There wasn't a point where I stepped back and thought, “Well, I've done it.”
Mostly, I wanted to finish it so I could move on.
And then something funny happened.
I posted it to Reddit.
People loved it.
Really loved it.
The painting that I had spent weeks getting increasingly irritated with was suddenly being passed around by tens of thousands of strangers. More than 126,000 people ended up seeing it.
People picked up on something in it that I had become completely incapable of seeing.
They called it beautifully unsettling.
And apparently they weren't the only ones who thought so, because the painting sold that same week.
To someone in Hong Kong.
I am now, unironically, an internationally sold artist.
Which is a sentence I enjoy saying considerably more than “I hated this painting.”
There is probably a more profound lesson here about trusting the work, or letting go of your own perception of something, or remembering that the artist isn't necessarily the best judge of what a piece will mean to someone else.
Maybe.
I'm not going to pretend the butter taught me some great philosophical lesson.
Mostly it taught me that I'm probably not painting butter again for a while.
But it did remind me of something important.
Sometimes the work doesn't feel good while you're making it.
Sometimes you don't get inspired.
Sometimes you don't have a breakthrough.
Sometimes you erase seven hours of work because the colors have gone completely wrong.
Sometimes you simply have to finish the thing.
And sometimes, after you've finally finished it and moved on because you're sick of looking at it, someone else sees something you couldn't.
I think that's part of becoming a better artist.
Not necessarily learning to love everything you make.
Learning to get the job done.
I still have a lot to learn.
But apparently, I can paint butter.
And apparently, someone in Hong Kong likes it.