"I wanted to be a painter"

The sentence lands like a confession pared to bone: four words holding adolescence, rebellion, and a life’s negotiation. Wanted is the hinge, a past-tense verb that opens onto unrealized futures and the ache of selection. To be makes the aspiration ontological, less about a pastime than about inhabiting a way of seeing. And painter is not just a trade; it is the archetype of solitary labor, pigment and light, the slowness of looking until the world relents.

The desire points toward purity, the studio’s measured silence, surfaces built by touch and time. Yet it also registers the gravitational pull of other paths, the tug of audience, humor, deadlines, and reproducibility. In a culture where images travel faster than brushstrokes dry, becoming something else can be survival, not surrender. The line suggests someone who learned to transpose an early longing into a medium with different physics, swapping canvas for panels, oil for ink, gallery walls for newsprint and screens.

There is tenderness in the renunciation. Every vocation chosen contains a cemetery of other selves, and the painter-self is one of the most luminous ghosts. But ghosts can guide. Composition, value, negative space, the drama of a single mark against a field, these are painterly instincts that can inhabit any form. The palette may be black and white, the brush a nib, the exhibition a weekly strip, yet the act remains an argument with seeing.

Read this way, the line holds neither apology nor boast, only the weather report of an artist’s climate: pressure from above, currents below, clear breaks in the clouds. Wanting persists as motive power even when the object shifts. The canvas becomes a page; the studio becomes a deadline; the eye keeps looking. What began as pigment ends as voice, and the voice, still, is colored. The wish keeps working.