There is a line from a movie that has stayed with me ever since I heard it:

“Art is not for the artist.”

I can’t remember the name of the movie, but in the scene, an adoring fan says this to a musician who is dismissing one of his own albums as “a piece of crap.”

The fan is hurt by hearing this because, to him, that album was a masterpiece. It meant something deeply personal. It became part of his life.

And it made me think about something I struggled to understand at the beginning of my own journey as an artist.

The shock of painting over a painting

Many years ago, one of my favourite artists casually mentioned that she was planning to paint over several of her paintings.

I remember feeling genuinely shocked.

Not because the paintings were bad — quite the opposite. I loved them. I couldn’t imagine wanting to erase them from existence. To me, once a painting existed, that was it. It had become real. Permanent. Sacred, somehow.

The thought of covering it with white paint felt almost heartbreaking.

At the time, it never even crossed my mind that a painting by an artist I admired so much might not eventually find its person.

But over time, I’ve started to realise something important:

Artists and viewers experience artwork completely differently.

What the artist sees

When an artist considers painting over a piece, they might see:

• the failed vision
• the awkward section
• the compromise
• the thing they couldn’t quite capture
• the gap between what was imagined and what actually appeared on the canvas

But the viewer doesn’t stand inside that gap.

They experience the painting emotionally, not technically.

Sometimes they see comfort where the artist sees flaws. Sometimes they see beauty where the artist sees frustration. Sometimes a painting the artist nearly destroyed becomes the one that deeply moves somebody else.

The painting I nearly painted over

And this actually happened to me years ago when I had my own art gallery on the Central Coast in New South Wales.

I had a painting sitting on my easel that I had painted quite a while earlier. I had already decided I didn’t like it enough to keep and was planning to paint over it.

Then a customer walked into the gallery… and bought it.

I honestly couldn’t believe it!

That painting had already mentally disappeared for me, yet someone else connected with it immediately.

After that moment, I became much more wary about painting over my work because I realised that sometimes it’s simply a matter of the right person seeing the right painting at the right time.

So… is art really not for the artist?

That’s where the line from the movie suddenly makes sense.

“Art is not for the artist.” Not entirely, anyway.

The making of it is for the artist. The process can be healing, grounding, exciting, expressive, joyful, messy, frustrating, transformative.

But once the artwork leaves the studio and enters someone else’s world…

it no longer belongs only to the artist’s private opinion.

It becomes part of someone else’s story.

When a painting needs to grow with you

That said, I also think there’s an important balance to this.

Not everything I create is great — and that’s okay. No artist loves every single thing they make. And realistically, I create far more paintings than I could ever possibly keep.

So sometimes, I still make the difficult decision to paint over a piece.

Especially lately, as I feel my work evolving.

I have been looking at some older paintings hanging on my walls and feeling that they need to grow with me. Not because they were failures, but because I can now see new possibilities hidden underneath them.

In a way, those older paintings become part of the foundation for the next version of myself as an artist.

And honestly, there’s something beautiful about that too.

Art is not static. Creativity is alive. Layers beneath a painting are still part of its history, even if nobody else ever sees them again.

The hidden life of a painting

But whenever I think about paintings disappearing under fresh paint, I also think about the unseen moments attached to them:

• the person who stopped scrolling because a painting made them breathe a little deeper
• the collector who felt understood by it
• the artist at the beginning of her journey who couldn’t believe someone would willingly erase something so beautiful

Maybe the artist had already moved on emotionally.

But someone else hadn’t.

And perhaps that’s one of the strangest and most wonderful things about creating art:

we never fully get to decide what becomes meaningful to other people.

I would love to know what you think. Have you ever loved something that the artist, maker, or creator didn’t seem to value in the same way? Or, if you’re an artist, have you ever painted over a piece and wondered if you should have waited a little longer?

Leave a comment below, I’d love to hear your thoughts.

You can also explore my available art here if you feel like wandering through more colour, nature and little sparks of joy.

x mimi.