I'm not trained as a painter, but I have occasional inchoate needs to express myself just like anyone else, and art supplies just sort of accrete around me after a while. I had some white paint, some blue, and a brush, just sitting there, and so I decided to paint something. Just in case this turned out to be a stupid thing to do, though, I painted it in a box—that is, on the inside of the box—so that nobody had to see.
It was the box my wallet had come in, fake leather with a hinged lid. As I went along, I started to like the idea of my secret expression; I was glad I was painting inside a box. I also started to find shades of blue pretty limiting, but I had already decided not to spend any money on this project. I saw it as re-using all those things that build up in your life, finding purpose in what you've got rather than attracting new useless toys that will then be free to sit around aging into meaninglessness. I only have so much to say in blue, though, especially since I don't know how to paint. Luckily, it was the beginning of the new year, and so we cut the locks off all the students' lockers and liberated their leftover supplies. The result was a thirty-gallon garbage bin full of art supplies, some unused, and while we knew we should leave it all for the students to claim themselves, one particular student, the previous owner of a tube of orange, got punished for carelessness and lack of devotion to their materials. So, blue and orange, plus, white, and after a while I let a friend of mine lend me some black. She's been making mostly black paintings lately, so he probably needs it more, but she thought it was cute of me to be making art that exists in the physical world, and she wanted to push it along. Personally, I found black to be very comforting. It blended into the shadows in the corners of the box, and hid the more embarrassing parts of the image from view.
After a while the interior of the box was covered, and more than covered; the paint had built up so much that the space inside the box was noticeably shrinking. I couldn't stop, though, I was just getting the hang of mixing paints. Since I couldn't buy anything, I was mixing paint on the interior of the lid, and then using them on the box itself. The lid was getting heavy with paint buildup, since I didn't have anything to clean it with, and in any case I liked seeing my previous efforts. I especially liked seeing them disappear under layers of new attempts, although the new attempts themselves were nothing to write home about. By about mid-February a soggy mountain of oils, like a mutant volcano, rose in lumps off the lid.
By this time the box was about half-full of layers upon layers of image; I was invested now, I was thinking too much about what kind of image should go in a box, and I couldn't decide what direction to go in. In fact, it was worse: I had already gone in some direction, but I couldn't tell what direction it was, or where to go from there, or whether I should have gone there in the first place. Indecision loomed; among the things I don't know about painting is how to stop. At the height of uncertainty, to pass the time and because I didn't know what else to do, I idly shut the box, to see if it could still close with all that paint in it. It did close, and the paint in the box and the paint on the lid met as it closed, somewhere in the middle; and then it stuck.
I couldn't open it. I didn't try very hard, because I could tell the image was irrevocably stuck to the paint on the lid; in fact, there wasn't really any point in differentiating between them any more. The box was just a container of paint now, in an undifferentiated mass. There was no way to get at it any more.
I couldn't just write it off, though. I'd been working on it for months. I tried to think of the whole thing as a failed experiment, a learning experience, it wasn't clear what I was supposed to learn from this particular failure, if I couldn't even see the results. I kept the box around; I even moved it from my house to my studio, and back again, so that it could sit there while I decided what to do about it. From the outside, you couldn't see any paint on it at all. It just sat there, being a box. But I couldn't open the box without destroying whatever image was in there, buried in itself. The only answer was to paint the same thing over again, in another box.
I didn't really need another wallet, but at this point I figured it was time to spend my own money; I didn't really want to convince my friend to buy wallets for me, just so that I could keep my project pure. I bought my own paint, too, but I hadn't noticed what kind of paint the first stuff had been, and I'm not sure I bought the same thing. But I decided to assume that everything was the same, and I started once again to paint.
I usually have very little patience for things I've already done once, but I found that I'd forgotten almost everything I'd done, at least in the early stages, and it was like an revelation to reconstruct the mistakes I'd made the first time. It was strange, realizing I knew better than them now. It felt like hearing from old friends you'd almost forgotten, and realizing they didn't look like their photographs any more. The painting went faster this time, but as it went on, I started to worry that I was departing from the original. I getting caught up in it, working faster without really thinking, and how can you get caught up in something that isn't brand new, like an unexpected insight? I thought I must be making up new things, going in new directions, even though I was using all the same colors. I was still using the same brush too, the only one I owned, but even that made a difference; it had been brand new the first time, and now it was old and stiff with the original paint. I took to staring at the image in the box, or rather the paint in the box, wondering if it even made an image at all, let alone the same image. This took up more of my time than the painting. Finally I got sick of all this indecision—I couldn't even tell how far I'd gotten with the reconstruction—and I tried closing the lid of the box, to see how close I was to the thickness of the original painting. The box stuck shut again.
By the end of the year I had seven new wallets, and seven closed, featureless boxes full of paint. They looked identical from the outside; they might have been identical on the inside, but of course it was impossible to tell. By the seventh box I had completely forgotten everything I had worked out about painting. I was just making marks in the box, white and orange and blue and black, and trusting them to add up to the same painting because, apparently, I was incapable of making anything else. We really just say the same thing over and over again, anyway.
I put them in a show, of course. You have to. My friend came to the show, to see all her black paint. She peered at my boxes politely. Most people were saying that they liked the idea very much, and she said so too, but she also said also that she would have preferred it if there had been only one painting. It was the kind, encouraging tone in her voice that hurt the most. I tried saying that there was only one painting, spread out from box to box, continuous and impenetrable. I didn't believe it while I was saying it, and from the polite look on her face, neither did she; but later on I did.