Gardening and Painting

I like painting pictures. Mostly it is old school, looking at things, admiring them, trying to create a likeness. I have sold some, bartered some. A problem any painter may have, even Leonardo da Vince, is that you are really satisfied only with a few, with many you feel “not perfect, but maybe good”, and some you can’t stant. Another thing about painting is there is a pleasure just mixing colors, working with the texture of paint. But everyone I know who paints on a regular basis ends up with a lot of paintings, not enough storage.

Gardening has all the same pleasures as painting, and for the same or analogous reasons. You make a plan, anticipate how it will look, with some uncertainty as to the final result. The sunflowers might be tall and strong, or thin and weak, depending on the weather. But you learn how to nurture each plant, and learn its properties. There is also a pleasure just from working with earth, with your hands. Pulling plants, trimming them. It is the same tactile pleasure as in painting. Time goes by, at the end of a session things look somewhat different. One difference is that at the end you might have something to eat, certainly something to look at. When you die, someone else will have a totally different idea for gardening, but they might decide to like this plant or that plant, pull up others. If you buy a piece of property, you consider a remarkable tree that someone long dead has planted.

QUOD VISUM PLACET — the ancient Latin definition of beauty. Something exists. Someone beholds it (maybe only God beholds it, like some jewel underground). When someone beholds, they just like it. Not because they can eat it, or it helps them get something else, just because it is good to look. It is one of the first messages of the Bible. God creates something, then He “sees that it is good.” He doesn’ need the things he makes, He just makes them because they are good. And He likes to look at them.

I do not like the idea that things like gardening or painting are the realm for a chosen few. Or that “musicians” are specialists. Times were, before we had television, that everybody did something. People built things themselves. Someone might have a flair more than others for one thing, but it is human and good to make things and work on things. We are better off for the intense artists who have devoted themselves to perfection, who agonize over their work, but in the times of the Dutch Masters, or the Italian Renaissance, the artists were craftsmen. They were hired to do jobs, as illustrators or people who design gravestones. I think that great masters of the past would have laughed if you equated their artistic inspirations with prophecy, that their states of concentration gave them a special channel to the deity.

ARS EST RECTA RATIO FACTIBILIUM — another Latinism — art is right reason about things that can be made. Any task where you are making things, whether gardening, or painting, or plumbing, is art. When you develop your skills, you have a state of concentration. You want the thing to look good, to work good, and you can get pleasantly lost in the work. It is an act of reason, and is also a matter of getting your hands dirty. Endorphins are involved. It is a good thing.