Being a painter

What's it like to be a painter?

By this, I mean a painter of the artistic sort, the type who are supposed to wear berets.

Experiences probably vary considerably between painters, but I think there are some points they all might share.

Painting is old-fashioned.

Even paints such as acrylics which are based on a plastic (acrylic polymers) are now over fifty years old. And acrylics aren't, believe me, where it's at when it comes to painting. Oils are still the king. Oils are more beautiful, easier to use; and they connect you to the wonderful history of art in a way that their ugly younger sister, acrylics, could never begin to do.

But it's old fashioned not just because of the medium, but because of the way the medium works in today's culture. Although we may often hear that contemporary culture is a visual one, it is only so to the extent that the images are moving ones convieying a sense of rapidity. Painting is boring, ,slow. The virtues of its craft are won slowly, both to the viewer and the maker.

When I exhibit paintings I wonder if anyone will come, and why thy don't just watch tv instead. Paintings just take so long to get into.

And painting is desperately unsexy. It's not cool. It really isn't about appearances. It's about process. You sit in your little room and draw, then you paint the drawing, then you show it to someone and they shrug their shoulders.

Most painters have dozens of unfinished paintings. They can't be bothered. The process is fatiguing. It never gives the slick results you get from photography. It's always too untidy.

This is something that gallery viewers seldom see, which is that behind the protective barriers and the frames the paintings are often much messier than they realise, with hairs and dull patches on their surfaces. Painting sometimes seems designed to frustrate: the results are so often disappointing. But a clever artist manges to make it seem as if it's all intentional, like a magician who pretends his slip was just there to "test the audience".

Painting is slow.

If it takes, say, two years of daily study to become a photographer it takes five to become just a goodish, bog standard painter. And the difference in time is increasing as cameras become easier to use, their images more readily available to editing in the digital age.

And if making pictures is slow, appreciation of art is even slower still. It just isn't that easy to get a handle on. There are even TV programmes about it, trying to help people. It isn't immediate, yet people try to find the sort of hit from paintings that they get from more immediate forms, such as rock music. They're wasting their time. They would be better just to watch films. Paintings don't give up their secrets that quickly.

Painting is messy.

Most painters go around with clothes with little specks on them. Or sometimes giant blobs.

Either way painting is a messy business.

Why bother?

Partly because it is slow. You really have to want to do it. The slowness seems to be a guarantee of seriousness. You can't get away with much.

Because of its history, even in just holding a brush you're inviting comparison with Someone very great Indeed. Don't bother unless you're in for the long haul. Someone who know a great deal indeed will come along and make a withering comment unless you're careful.

Painting is romantic.

There is the medium itself. It's beautiful. The paint, the tubes, the knives and the easels. Everything has this aura, this weight. Things are made of wood, or hog-hair, or willow or something with an exotic name, like copal or gesso.

These things are wonderfully romantic.

But sometimes it seems that romantic things are out of fashion and everything has to be made of some disposable nylon rubbish in a factory in Taiwan.

Painters look. Photographers skim.

Painters look. Not just at what they're making, but at the world. Then they look at other works of art. Photographers just don't go that far. Ask them. Or ask an architect. Once upon a time trainee architects were sent to visit Europe to study the great monuments of architecture. They sat with their pens and pads and made little drawings. Now its just snap snap here and snap snap there.

Which architects do you think look harder?

What about the money?

Some artists make a lot of money. Most lose a lot. They lose a lot because the materials are expensive as are studios and because they can't be trusted by anyone to hold a proper job. So they work is stupid jobs here and there an sponge of other people.

Sometimes artists sell pictures, usually to their long suffering families or friends.

They don't sell pictures often but they pretend that they do. I think it's regarded as bad form to complain.

Painters become mad.

Painters tend to regard their art with a protectiveness that I haven't seen elsewhere, except in classical music. With painting seem to come a series of duties, as if you are there to serve the art form and not vice versa.

Tadeusz Deręgowski

Tadeusz Deręgowski was born in Lusaka, Zambia in 1969, but grew up in Scotland where he studied Fine Art at Edinburgh University and Edinburgh College of Art. He subsequently moved to London, where he exhibited widely and had works published in The Times, The Spectator and The Daily Telegraph. He moved to Florianopolis in the Winter of 2006.

He has been painting for the last twenty years