What is the point

So my fun with acrylics continues. The painting I made yesterday is not much of a painting – a pretty picture of a scattering of small flowers. I’m practicing creating textures, blending and trying out the paint itself. The more one paints, the more one understands the nature of the medium. I have a few small canvas boards lying around, so am using them up now for my practice paintings. I've decided I will not post my practice paintings on my blog.. will post only the ones that I find meaningful and express a deeper part of myself... or find special in some nebulous way..

I’m also trying to loosen up my painting as much as I can. So, while I categorise the flower painting as a semi abstract, it is another little step towards that direction. I find the world of abstraction completely fascinating. While I do admire and enjoy realistic or representational art, for they too are all about composition, shapes, colours, textures and so on, it is the freedom and mysteriousness of abstract that always draws me to it, keeps me enthralled. Having said that, what is really realistic or abstract? In whatever way an artist applies her/his colours, whatever she/he creates on canvas, it’s all an illusion, after all. Which is another fascinating aspect of the similarity between art and Nature. I mean, is the tree or the flower one sees really as they appear to us? Under the microscope one discovers them as completely different from what they appear outside. Or why not go in deeper, into their atomic world, again completely different from both their molecular structure and their apparent realistic structure.

I remember how I used to love my biology books back in school, not particularly because of the lessons in them, but because of the fascinating pictures of the cross sections of leaves and flowers, the microscopic structures of cells. Even as early as that, though I was drawing and painting realistic leaves and flowers in my drawing books, I was naturally attracted to abstracts, which I realized much later. So I used to love my bio homework wherein I had to draw those diagrams, and do them diligently, while I neglected my other homework, and my bio teachers always thought I had a special interest in bio as a subject :) - Anyway, getting back to where I was - Look at the sky through a telescope – when I see the pictures of galaxies and nebulae, all I can comprehend is that Nature, Creation, is just one great abstract artist. Abstract art is all around us, the colour patterns of a butterfly’s wings, the shape and structure of a lowly amoeba, the magnificent billowing of thunderclouds, the night sky strewn with stars and moonlight..  

While I was painting the pretty little picture yesterday, that old conundrum of mine kept nibbling at my insides – is this really what I want to paint, am I finding it fulfilling? What do I really want to paint? What am I trying to express? Why am I trying to express anything at all? What is the point of expressing deeper parts of myself? Does it make any difference to me, to anyone, to anything? And even while these questions bubble in my brain, I’m struck by how similar they are to the questions I ask about Life, Creation, itself.  What is the point of my existence? What is the point of it all? Does it make any difference for Creation to be or not to be? What is the point?