Art & Creativity Quote by Max Cannon

There’s a quiet ache in Max Cannon’s line, the kind that lands hardest because it refuses to melodramatize itself. “I hope to actually get back to painting someday... soon” reads less like a plan than a self-reminder, a gentle insistence that the older, slower self is still in there somewhere. The ellipsis does the emotional heavy lifting: it’s hesitation, delay, the weight of deadlines. “Actually” is the tell. It suggests that, in Cannon’s world, painting isn’t just another medium; it’s the thing that counts as the real work, the private standard by which everything else gets measured.

Then comes the pivot: “I sort of transitioned into cartooning from painting.” “Sort of” is strategic modesty, but it’s also an admission that creative careers rarely move in clean, heroic arcs. Cartooning, especially in the contemporary economy, can be both an artistic outlet and a survival skill: more legible to editors, more reproducible, more instantly communicative. Painting asks for time, space, money, and a tolerance for ambiguity. Cartooning rewards compression, deadlines, and a public-facing clarity.

The subtext is a familiar modern trade-off: the medium that pays (or at least circulates) can slowly displace the medium that originally taught you how to see. Cannon isn’t disowning cartooning; he’s marking the cost of becoming proficient at a form that’s always one panel away from the next obligation. The “someday... soon” is the artist trying to reclaim slowness before the calendar wins again.