A Painters Life is Not a Happy One?

Clives James says: "There are lots of reasons to be cheerful about the world, many the result of human creativity - the difficulty is remembering not to be miserable.

Jeffrey Smart is one of several great living Australian painters who have continued the success of their now-deceased role models in carrying our unusually productive little nation's name into the international world of art. Among the illustrious dead are such names as Sidney Nolan, Russell Drysdale and Arthur Boyd. Among the resplendent living are Margaret Olley, John Olsen, and Jeffrey Smart. They are all getting on in years but they have that unquenchable sprightliness that painters so often seem to have, possibly because they lead more enjoyable lives than writers.

This last opinion of mine might have something to do with my own temperament. My feeling that I would have been a happier man if I had been a painter and indeed a happier man if I had been a gravedigger - a very useful occupation, in my view, as it was in the view of the gravedigger who met Hamlet, himself a gloomy fellow - that feeling might have something to do with a disposition towards melancholy. From the inside I don't actually feel like a wet weekend. But apparently I strike other people that way."

Painters HAPPY??

Now come on...

MAYBE if you had someone to pay your mortgage. MAYBE if you were single and could do what you want in the hours you wanted (or needed) to do them in. MAYBE if you know for sure you are doing the right thing and have a happy client base that agrees with you. MAYBE if you haven't got a car in the drive, a cat that needs watching, a husband that needs feeding and a house that needs cleaning. Or a loan that needs paying, come to that (student loan system is biased towards graduates who join management training schemes such as advertised on Hobsons, Hobsons being a very apt name, its that kind of employment or nothing - but who wants an artist working in a bank or come to that what kind of artist COULD work in a bank??).

Notice only ONE of those names is female. She must be single! Or be blessed with a laid back bohemian partner, more than likely she is a lesbian. I'll have to look it up. If she is married, its probably to a fellow creative. Otherwise where is the permission (explicit or implicit) to embrace freedom? And ignore the washing, the dust and little bits of creeping flab?