Then there's actually painting a picture. The picture shouldn't be the purpose, at no point should you attempt to paint a picture. No you should attempt something else, a likeness if it's a portrait, an emotion, an expression, a statement even. But on no account should you try and paint a picture.

The picture must needs be the result of the effort, the product of the process.

Every artist was first an amateur.
Ralph Waldo Emerson

"perfection has holes in - to let the light through" Robert Tear

30,000 years ago, give or take a month, in front of a group from his tribe, in an attempt to explain the mysteries of life, early man put his hand on the rock face of an underground cavern, the better to commune with the spirits beyond, and spat ochre from his mouth to further add to the illusion that he was indeed passing into the spirit world. In the flickering torchlight the people gathered around him gasped in awe at the spectacle, the magic, the emotion, and felt better for it.

Our man took his hand away at the end of the ceremony, and there, on the rockface, deep in the earth, remained the outline of his hand. People would come back and see this outline and recall their feelings. Man had made a mark and art was born.

"a portrait is a painting where there is something wrong with the mouth" John Sargent 1856 - 1925

It doesn't matter whether the artist, brush in hand, paints twelve hours a day for seven days and produces a picture or whether the artist sits looking at a blank canvas, wanders around, eating nuts and figs [and cheese] looking at books, drinking too much black coffee and staring at a blank canvas twelve hours a day for six days, then in the last few hours of the seventh day paints a picture.

It's only middle class work ethics that attach meaning to time and size. See Ruskin v Whistler 'flinging a pot of paint in the face of the public' Ruskin accused Whistler of charging too much for a brief moment's painting, Whister responded that he wasn't charging for the moment painting but for a life time's experience. Whistler won and was awarded a farthing damages, [don't know who paid costs]

But it's still a hard one break free from