The Blank Canvas's Idiotic Stare
Just slap anything on when you see a blank canvas staring at you like some imbecile. You don't know how paralysing that is, that staring of a blank canvas, which says to the painter: you can't do anything. The canvas has an idiotic stare and mesmerises some painters so much that they turn into idiots themselves. Many painters are afraid in front of the blank canvas, but the blank canvas is afraid of the truly passionate painter who dares and who has broken the spell of 'you can't' once and for all.
, Letters to Theo van Gogh (1883)
The canvas has an “idiotic stare,” van Gogh writes—not intimidating but empty, stupid with potential. What paralyzes us isn’t the difficulty of the work but its openness. Anything could go there. Anything at all.
This paralysis predates every technology we’ve invented to ease it. Van Gogh wasn’t facing a cursor’s blink or a blank document that auto-saves our nothing. He was facing linen and oil, and still he found the emptiness mesmerizing in the worst sense—turning painters, he says, into idiots themselves.
How strange that we keep reinventing new solutions to this ancient problem. New tools to help us begin. New ways to generate something, anything, to break the spell of “you can’t.” And yet the problem persists: having help doesn’t dissolve the fear. Sometimes it compounds it. Now there are two sources of possible action—our own fumbling marks and the fluent assistance available at a prompt—and between them, a new kind of paralysis: which beginning is mine to make?
Van Gogh’s prescription is almost violent in its simplicity: slap anything on. Don’t be elegant. Don’t be right. Be willing to make something stupid on the stupid surface. The blank canvas, he insists, is afraid of the painter who dares. Not the painter who knows, not the painter with skill or vision, but the painter who dares—who breaks the spell through sheer willingness to act.
What breaks the spell for you? Is it the same thing that broke it ten years ago? The point isn’t to refuse help—it’s to notice what the help is helping you avoid. Is it avoiding labor, or avoiding the particular risk of being seen to fail? There is a difference. Van Gogh knew the canvas would hold his mistakes. He made them anyway, believing that passion—not perfection—was what the emptiness truly feared.