Why go online, when you can paint?

What personality trait do you believe has influenced your life the most? Some people will name their desire to please, or their introversion – their sense of curiosity, or their inability to spend acres of time alone. It’s hard to say for certain, but I would wager that mine is the fact that I hate being at home.

All my friends know about it, and often mock me gently for it. “Well if there’s one thing you like, it’s being outside the house”, one of them said the day the first lockdown was announced. He’d called to check in on me as, yes, he was right: my favourite thing in the world is to be outside, doing something. Being inside and doing nothing in particular is, as far as I’m concerned, a true vision of hell.

Still, I was left with no choice in 2020. I wracked my brain and tried to come up with endless things to do within the confines of my little flat. I drew and painted, first in acrylics then in watercolours. I exercised and exercised and exercised, relentlessly, from morning to night.

The world reopened and, within seconds, I moved my whole life outdoors again. I went back to my circus school, threw all my arts and crafts supplies in a big box, which I closed and hid behind the couch, and resumed my mission to spend as little time indoors as possible. It was great, and made me feel amazing.

Though some people had managed to acquaint themselves with the delights of having quiet downtime during the pandemic, I had the exact opposite. It merely confirmed my view that nothing was ever gained by staying in the house. In a way, I haven’t meaningfully moved on since then. I’m writing this from a terrace, for no reason other than “a terrace is not my flat”.

Already, I have made plans for my weekend, as the idea of lounging the entire day makes my body want to break out in hives. There is one small difference, though. You could blink and miss it. What am I planning to do on Saturday morning? I’ll probably paint. I could run some errands, go charity shopping in my neighbourhoods, but I won’t: the weather will be nice, so I am planning to sit on my balcony and get my oils out.

The specific type of paint is important: as I said, neither watercolours nor acrylics were interesting to me. For some reason, oil painting was the one that stuck. I went to a one-day workshop last spring, in the depths of south west London, and something clicked there. The following month, I went to an arts shop, bankrupted myself on supplies, and I got to work.

In some ways, it’s been hard to know if I’ve been getting better over time, especially as I stopped over the winter, when the weather wasn’t exactly balcony-friendly. What I am enjoying, however, is attempting to teach myself to close the gap.

I first noticed the gap when I got writing: I would have this idea in my head, but whatever was on the page just wasn’t quite what I’d envisaged. It took years of practice, and it still doesn’t always happen but, most of the time, the words coming out of me can match whatever thought or feeling I had inside of me. It’s hugely satisfying.

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It’s still a very rare occurrence with art, and I’m yet to fully get there, but the gap is already smaller now than it was, say, back in March or April.

In short: painting is both something that captures my attention entirely when I’m doing it, and an activity I now get to associate with broader, more long-term goals. The more I do it, the better I get; the better I get, the more fulfilled I feel. It’s terrific.

It’s also teaching me, slowly, cautiously, that it is possible to stay at home and still end up having a good time. To say that’s a huge deal would be an understatement: in my 33 years on this earth, aside from a cloud of inertia which briefly hung over my teenage years, I could never be convinced to remain idle.

In fact, I worry my new habit may be out of control. I went to an arts supplies shop the other day to buy some new brushes and canvases, and somehow I ended up buying both those and several kilos of clay. My thinking is that, when the weather forces me away from my terrace soon, I can do some sculpting over in my living room. When spring comes around again, I’ll be able to paint them, and the cycle will start again.

Oh, and do you know what the best thing is? Painting is entirely offline. When my fingers are covered in turpentine, there’s no way for me to safely reach for my phone. It’s heaven.

Maybe that was the secret all along: being indoors alone is a delight, as long as the internet and the outside world remain out of bounds.