Art & Creativity Quote by Jonathan Lethem

There is a quiet violence in the phrase “abandoned it at 19,” a choice of verb that makes leaving painting sound less like a hobby drifting away and more like a breakup with collateral damage. Lethem isn’t simply marking a career pivot; he’s staging a small drama about seriousness itself: the way young artists internalize a hierarchy of forms and decide which one will earn them a life. Painting becomes the sacrificed lover, writing the discipline he can justify to himself.

The sentence is also a self-mythology in miniature. Nineteen is the classic age of artistic self-invention, when identity is built by subtraction as much as accumulation. By framing writing as something he began “seriously,” Lethem implies that painting belonged to an earlier, less accountable self. Yet the subtext cuts both ways: if writing required seriousness, painting may have felt dangerously pleasurable, private, or ungovernable. In that light, “abandoned” reads like a preemptive defense against the fear of not being good enough at the visual thing he loved.

Context matters: Lethem’s work is famous for collage-thinking, genre-bending, sampling and recombining cultural materials the way a visual artist layers textures. The quote hints that the painter didn’t disappear so much as migrate. He may not “paint anymore,” but he still composes scenes, colors, and atmospheres with prose. It’s an artist’s confession that the medium changed, not the impulse - and that the story we tell about becoming “serious” is often the story we tell to make loss feel like purpose.