Why do artists love art?

Dun horse, Lascaux, France. (Wiki Commons)

Because it isn't accounting, that's why. It's endlessly different, and thereby entertaining and demanding of the intellect's and the spirit's attentions.

A column of numbers remains the same no matter what interrupts one's work with it. A painting? No. It changes, and not just because the paint dries, either. It changes because each time you approach the canvas or paper or clay, you will approach it with a different attitude than you were experiencing last time you worked on it. You might more accurately say the artist has changed, but can one really separate the artist and the art?

Art isn't accounting because there is no one simple point to reach that says the work is finished. If you add a column of numbers, you will know you are done when you have checked your work and realize all numbers were correctly entered, correctly added, and that the final sum is correct.

You will know when the artwork you are creating is done when....when....when....

Now. Is it done now? Probably not. Probably, it is never really finished. You may stop work because the commission has to be delivered SOON, or because you think one more stroke of the brush will push it into the muddy waters of overpainting, or because you're bloody sick of the damn thing and wish you had never started it. So you finish it and stash it in the basement behind the broken bicycles and half-empty paint cans and your heirs find it and--since artists only get popular after death--they sell the awful thing and get rich as Croesus, while you were almost as poor as a church mouse.

Still, thank goodness art isn't accounting. It's much more important than that. (By the way, I do have friends who are accountants, and my mother was an accountant. But I think they'd agree with me...besides which, the accountants I know these days all dabble in an artform at least; one books musical acts, for example, because he's a folk music aficionado.)

Even in prehistory, art was of ultimate importance. The cavemen didn't paint numbers in that underground grotto in Lascaux; they painted horses and bulls. Of course, you might say numbers--Arabic numbers and even Roman numerals--had not been invented yet, so they didn't have a choice. Yes, and? Proving my point: Art is more important than numbers, and was invented first. Numbers can tell how much, but art can tell what. Knowing what is, in my opinion, a lot more important to human life than knowing how many. And it would seem that is very deeply ingrained in the human psyche.

Still, I wouldn't mind having a few more quid to count. But I'm not going to trade the life of the right side of my brain for the satisfaction of the left. I'm not going to become an accountant so I can toil at stuff I don't like in order to have more holidays in Cyprus, and the much-awaited trip to Cuba (still being awaited.)

But I did have the good sense to marry an engineer.