A Painter's Musings on the Visual World

A basic tenant of my education was to admit what I did not know. Admitting the unknown opened the door to learning as did asking questions. Most of us heard a school teacher encourage us to participate by saying there was no such thing as a stupid question. When we left school and entered the competitive world of work we learned there actually was such a thing. The real world was not that pure and questioning was often unwelcome. In school, inexperienced but eager to learn was a positive; not so much in the job interview. I was hired for mundane jobs by acting like I knew things I did not, only to cram them into my head after I got hired. Excel, Access? Sure, I could do that! Even though I was able to get by and learn only as much as I needed, I would end up bored with my half-knowledge of something I really did not care about. 

Jane Chapin  'Pixie Dust'  8 x 10 Oil

Being a painter requires me to realize how much skill I lack. To improve our painting takes time, observation and challenge and you can’t fake it even if you can hit a lucky stroke once in a while. Becoming a painter is the realization that it is never fully mastered, even by the masters. Questioning and experimenting is part of that as much as the technical fundamentals.

I had a chance several years ago to have lunch with Donald Rumsfeld who, following his long career in government, wrote a memoir called “Known and Unknown.” In the forward he gets right to the subject. “There are known knowns: there are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns…we know there are some things (we know) we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns…it is the latter category that tends to be the most difficult one.”  Rumsfeld is an often controversial person with a sharp wit and way more open, kind and curious about the world than I expected. At the time we met he was 85 and had just completed collaborating on a video board game. We traded books and later that year he would buy 20 of my Gold Star Land of the Free books to give as gifts. 

He described a known known as something like gravity. It is something we know with certainty. A known unknown might be how armed an enemy state might be. An example of an unknown unknown was the 911 attacks. Another one is what we are living through right now. We knew there was a possibility for a new virus because there are new viruses all the time. We did not know it would turn our lives upside down overnight and threaten the very freedoms we take for granted.

I feel quite comfortable going back to the position of questioning, not knowing and even asking stupid questions. Simply saying “I don’t know” is actually pretty liberating. From the outset of this virus, the predictions have been off, best practices have failed in many cases and the goalposts have shifted almost daily. What has surprised me are the entrenched positions of the “experts” (everyone from scientists to politicians to neighbors) who in the face of an unknown are so convinced of their answer. Maybe it is the lightning speed of internet “facts” where a 12-year-old can correct their grandparents in real time regardless of practical life experience. Perhaps it is social media where the urge to ‘say it first’ eclipses the time of careful consideration. Stupid questions or any questioning seems to be unwelcome. We must follow rules without hesitation or risk public shaming. And there is no shortage of people willing to point out that which they see as ‘stupid.’

It is as if we don’t know that blood-letting was once an accepted medical practice. It was once settled science that the earth was the center of the universe, resulting in Galileo being convicted of heresy before being proven right. Breaking the law and the rules have resulted in the founding of our country and our constitution, the existence of the Underground Railroad and the hiding of Jews in Nazi Germany.

 Jane Chapin 'Greve en Chianti' 10 x 8 Oil

Imagine the music and dance that would never have strayed from purely classical to discover jazz or hip hop. Imagine art that never broke out of classical realist paintings of the saints to give us impressionism, colorists and the celebration of the everyday. There is plenty of precedence for questioning the rules in both science and art and it all starts with what we don't know.