Have You Ever Wanted to Paint?

by James Wallace Harris, 9/27/23

I spend my days grazing on ideas. I listen to music, watch television or movies, read books, articles, or short stories, look at art books, browse the internet, read history, study popular science, and consume a lot of YouTube videos. All of it is about idea processing.

For breakfast, this morning I read “Painting of Hannah” by Lan Samantha Chang in the September 2023 issue of Harper’s Magazine. Follow the link if you want to read the story too.

“Painting of Hannah” is a short story about a young American, Jacob, studying art in France. Jacob stays at an atelier, apprentice to Thomas Gaugnot, a master painter who is trained in the naturalist technique, a student of Rennes, who was a student of Renoir, with a lineage all the back to Leonardo.

Gaugnot comes across like a Zen master, not saying much but tricking Jacob into seeing. Jacob must sacrifice both his ego and his desire for the beautiful artist’s model, Hannah, who he paints every day. Hannah, a young woman, lives with the older Gaugnot, and is Gaugnot’s muse. Gaugnot tells Jacob:

“They say my technique is obsolete,” Gaugnot said. “That is true. It is secret. It became a secret because no one cared. The attention of the world turned away from this kind of painting, what you call naturalism. You—­” His gaze pushed Jacob back; the chair creaked. “You are here to learn the techniques of this secret.” He smiled a small, triumphant smile. “You think it is romantic.”

We watch as Jacob learns to see. I’ve made a few lame attempts to learn to draw, but I’ve never stuck with it. I’ve even had some classes. I’ve learned with a few hours of work I can show some improvement, but I know becoming an artist takes years. That’s why I gave up, but that was lame of me.

I have several friends who are currently studying various kinds of painting. I admire them for not giving up. You don’t have to compete with John Singer Sargent to enjoy learning to draw and paint. You don’t have to move to France and study with a master for years. Ten thousand hours might make you a master, but thirty hours is enough to produce amazing results. Yet knowing that doesn’t allow me to apply myself at learning to draw. I hate that.

I wish I had that discipline because what I really want is to learn to see like an artist. That’s what the story hints at. That us ordinary folk are blind to most of the visual world. Gaugnot pushes Jacob into seeing what’s in front of the rest of us that we ignore.

The human eye can only see a tiny portion of the visual spectrum or hear a sliver of the audio spectrum. and there are other wavelengths of electromagnetic spectrum that are even beyond our senses. So, it’s a shame we don’t even make the most of what we can perceive.

Evidently, learning to paint means learning to see what we’ve never bothered to look at. I like that. I like that because that’s what I do all day long with my information grazing.

I feel reading and watching helps me discern finer shades of ideas, and learning to write is learning to paint with words. Writing these blogs is learning to see more into the spectrum of language.

But I wonder about Gaugnot and Jacob. They learn to put what they see on a canvas, but do we see what they saw when looking at their paintings? We might see beauty but without understanding the insight. And if I read something written by someone discerning something specific in the reality of ideas, can I discern it too by reading their writing? Or is it only telling me that I need to go look for myself?

There was something in this story, “Painting of Hannah” about Nietzsche that intrigued me. It was the concept of “Eternal return.” It hints at a Groundhog Day existence. That’s the thing about learning to discern all there is from the firehose of information we live with daily; it would take several lifetimes to learn how to perceive everything. Are we Bill Murray living the same life over and over? Are the Hindus right about reincarnation?

I don’t think I’m coming back, so I want to distinguish details as I can before I die, both visually and cognitively. I wonder if I shouldn’t study drawing again. Would the discipline I got from learning about light also apply to studying the perception of ideas?

All my life I’ve wished I had more self-discipline, but if a genie from a magic lamp offered me three wishes, what would be the downside if I asked for more discipline? There’s always a downside in those tales. Maybe I’ve already been granted that wish and I’m living the existence of eternal return.

Tonight, I might snack on “Painting of Hannah” again and reread the story before I go to bed. Reading short stories is like learning to paint, you must keep looking to see everything.

Tomorrow I will wake up and find something else to inspire me for the day. Jacob worked on the same painting daily for months. Is that the key? Maybe I should stay with one concept for months. Maybe the secret is not accumulating more information but studying the same information repeatedly.

JWH