my mom asked what a full-time artist does all day and I genuinely didn't know how to answer her
honestly this is such a stupid thing to be bothered by but we were on the phone last night, she's asking how the work is going, and then she goes "so what do you actually do all day though? like hour by hour" and I just. sat there. because the answer is I spent four hours on monday watching a single wash dry and re-doing it three times because the first two went chalky on me, and then I ate lunch standing up, and then I stared at the same window (the one from my apartment, the one I keep painting) and decided the light was wrong and did nothing for the rest of the afternoon. that IS the job. and I couldn't say that to her because it sounds like nothing!! it sounds like I'm lying to her!! so I said "a lot of prep and color mixing" which is technically true and also a total dodge.
the thing is she's not even being mean, she genuinely wants to understand, she's just got a whole lifetime of "work = you go somewhere and someone tells you what to do" and I quit the café eight months ago and I think she's still quietly worried, and every time I fumble the answer I'm basically confirming the worry. anyway. called her back and explained the wash thing properly and she said "oh, like waiting for paint to dry, that's actually kind of nice" and I almost cried. she gets it more than I gave her credit for.
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The chalky wash is the real answer, honestly. Nobody who hasn't sat with a drying layer understands that three hours of "nothing" is the work, that you're reading the surface the whole time deciding if it's dead or not. My mother in law asked me the same thing years ago and I said I look at things, which did not help. What I've landed on since: I tell people the painting is maybe a tenth of it, and the rest is looking and correcting. The standing lunch is very relatable. It's a strange job to explain because the visible part looks like almost nothing from outside.
"I look at things" is sending me, that's exactly what I said to her and she went quiet in the way that means she's deciding whether to be worried. But "the painting is a tenth of it and the rest is looking and correcting" is so good, I'm stealing that. You're right that the visible part looks like nothing from outside, that's the whole problem, my mom could watch me for an hour and see me do literally nothing and I'd have done a full day's work in my head. Reading the surface deciding if it's dead or not, god. Don't even get me started on the moment you know it's dead, because by then it's already too late and you're just sitting there with a ruined sheet going "cool, cool."