Why we stopped making art

At a recent local festival, my friend and I were invited to set up a table with paints, paper, and brushes as part of our Social Enterprise focusing on creativity and self discovery. We thought people might enjoy the invitation to create something on the spot. And they did. Or, rather, the kids did. They rushed forward without hesitation, mixing wildly, destroying my friend’s markers, making circles, creatures, noise. But the adults lingered. Some watched. A few smiled politely. Most walked by. Those who stopped often apologized before they even began: “I’m not good at this,” or “It’s been years.” It wasn’t judgment I saw in their faces—it was fear. Fear of doing it wrong. Fear of not being “creative enough.” Fear of being seen.

No child is born afraid of making art. Give a toddler a crayon and they will scribble away for hours, without expectation. The instinct to create—to shape, to mark, to express—is as natural as play, as movement, as voice. But somewhere along the way, this instinct is overwritten. We are taught to replace creative freedom with caution. It starts subtly. Praise for drawing inside the lines. Disapproval for making a mess. The shift from exploration to evaluation. Art becomes something to be graded, compared, and ultimately judged.

This isn’t just about childhood education. It’s about how society categorizes people into creators and consumers, talents and amateurs, worthy and unworthy. It’s about how we’ve built a culture where expression is only valid if it’s excellent, shareable, or profitable. We’ve made art into a performance—an act of proving rather than being. So people stop. They stop not because they lose interest, but because they’re made to believe they don’t belong in that space, they do not have the right to art. Because being bad at something publicly feels dangerous in so many ways.

But art is not a talent or a skill. Art is a human impulse. To draw is to claim space. To paint is to assert feeling. To create is to say: I exist, I notice, I feel. A culture that suppresses personal expression doesn’t do so by accident. It serves a purpose. When people are disconnected from their creative instincts, they are more manageable, more predictable. Creativity breeds unpredictability. It fosters dissent, curiosity, disruption. And that makes it inconvenient. Institutions—from schools to governments to corporations—prefer order. Creativity is harder to control. It leads to new questions, to uncomfortable feelings and memories, to wild possibilities. If a population is trained to believe that only a special few are allowed to make things, then most will never even try. Most will stay in their lane.

And when we stop making things, we start buying them. Consumer culture thrives on the erosion of self-expression. When people no longer trust their own creative instincts, they become dependent on externally produced aesthetics. They buy beauty instead of making it. They follow trends instead of inventing their own language. They forget that they were ever capable of shaping the world around them.

Even within the art world, this pattern repeats. The gatekeeping is subtle but sharp: academic jargon, gallery approval, critical reception. There is a silent violence in how we define legitimacy. We elevate the comfortable over the raw and personal. We hide the tools of creativity behind paywalls, institutions, and expertise. And all of this serves power. When people believe they are not allowed to create, they become easier to silence.

And that’s the real loss: not the absence of art objects, but the absence of voices. Of unfiltered emotions. Of resistance.

In my own practice, as you know, I often paint with great detail and precision. I am disciplined and devoted. I was recently hospitalized for painting for too many hours a day to produce the paintings for my upcoming gallery show. But over time, I’ve also come to treasure the opposite—the looseness and unpredictability of abstract expression, of deliberate imperfection. What I found surprising wasn’t the validity of abstraction (I have a specialization in contemporary art) —but how liberating it could feel in my own hands. When I let go of the need to plan every stroke or define everything, something shifted. I reconnected with painting not just as a craft, but as a place of feeling, of instinct, of personal honesty.

I have a specialization in contemporary art and what I came to realize is art isn’t good or bad depending on how skilled it looks, or how well it fits into current aesthetics. Art isn’t made valuable by the opinions of critics or institutions. Art is made meaningful by the intention behind it. By the presence, sincerity, and emotional truth that lives inside the act of making. If there is heart in it, it matters. Throughout history, visual expression has belonged to everyone. Cave walls, cloth patterns, religious icons, handmade tools, tattooed skin. These are all evidence that the need to create lives in the bones of every culture.

In Ways of Seeing, John Berger writes: "The relation between what we see and what we know is never settled." And that is precisely the power of art—it unsettles. It complicates the visible. It reclaims space for multiple truths. Bell Hooks, in her writing on art and cultural criticism, often emphasized the power of aesthetic experience as a site of resistance and transformation. She insisted that art is not a luxury, but a necessity for liberation. To deny people the freedom to express visually is not neutral. It is a silencing. A stripping away of a basic human language.

If you’ve ever wanted to paint but stopped yourself—ask why. Was it shame? Fear? The voice of a teacher? The pressure to be productive? The belief that someone else would do it better? Whatever it was, it doesn’t have to be. You don’t have to be good. You don’t have to share it. You don’t have to turn it into content. You’re allowed to make things just to make them. To feel something you can’t explain. To listen to your own song. Pick up a brush. A pen. A rock. A stick. Make a mark. Let it be ugly. Let it be honest. Let it be yours. We were not made to be spectators. We were made to participate. And that begins, always, with a mark.