Painting for What, Exactly?

This past weekend I was at Kontrast, coming home I always feel so inspired by the miniatures. This year I felt very strongly the emotions of the people as well. 

I've been to a lot of competitions since my first event in 2022 - multiple shows a year, across standard and masters categories. I've come home with golds, silvers, bronzes. I've come home with a highly commended pin. I've come home with nothing at all. 

This weekend I was awarded a Silver in painting < 54 mm and a Bronze in > 54 mm painting - both at masters level. I was super honored to receive this validation.

Some people I spoke to at Kontrast were there for the first time. They’re guardedly cautious, not really expecting a medal, just wanting to see where they stood. Others arrived with high expectations and an unmistakable certainty about themselves. And others still were in that particularly ruthless limbo between Standard and Masters, where you've outgrown one category and haven't yet grown into the next.

I saw a lot of myself in the emotions of the people I talked to. What I’ve realized is that the experience of a miniature painting competition, mostly comes down to personality.

Coming home, I talked to a friend, who's been thinking about getting back into running. He mentioned that signing up for a race would motivate him to train in a way that's much harder to do without that external pressure. Something clicks into place when there's a date on the calendar and a result on the line.

I think something similar happens for a lot of people in miniature painting. We talk about painting for competition as opposed to painting for gaming or perhaps more rarely, painting for ourselves. 

But I think we could expand on that language a little. What about painting for joy? For an idea you couldn't get out of your head? For creativity, for the feeling of a project that's entirely yours? I know many of those feelings get folded into "painting for ourselves" but even still, it does good to stop and ask the question: what am I actually painting for right now?

I have a murky relationship with painting competitions. I think they too often inadvertently push a set of values onto attendees - values that can foster perfectionism and an increasing dependence on judges' validation, in a way that sometimes (not always) borders on the unhealthy.

What strikes me most is that in many ways, the novice attending their first competition has mastered painting for themselves to a degree that many far more experienced painters have lost. They haven't yet learned to filter their work through someone else's judgement. They're still painting first and foremost for themselves.

I've known painters who got very good at painting for competition and along the way completely lost their joy of painting. I've also known painters who feed on it and have a genuinely healthy relationship with the whole thing. Ultimately, I think it comes down to ego and how aware of it you're willing to be.

I joked with a new friend at the show about what it would do to a person if the judges' feedback simply was to put down the paintbrush. We laughed about that for a bit.

I also had a teacher who once told me he struggled to paint miniatures, because he'd come to feel that on the list of things the world needs, another neatly painted figure ranks pretty low. I understood what he meant. In one sense, he was right.

But I don't think that's the whole story.

Miniature painting, in my life, is about a feeling. A sense of flow and deep concentration where the stresses of the day evaporate, and the focus of all your attention becomes small centred on a figure in your hands. 

What I've often felt is that painting for competition takes that space and turns it into a sport where the result is judged over process. And holding onto the other mindset - ‘the process mindset’ has been genuinely challenging for me, especially when I've gone to shows expecting a medal and come home with nothing at all.

I still feel the pull of judges' validation. At this point in my life my mind frames it as a business consideration. Winning at competitions does validate my work as a teacher and commission painter. So you see that the ego still has some hold - I think it probably always will. I just hope the grip is a little looser than it used to be.

I want to leave you with a question.

On the list of things this hobby gives you: the community, the problem-solving, the flow state, the finished piece on the shelf, the medals, the feedback, the process itself. How high on that list of benefits is a technically beautiful miniature? There are no wrong answers. I think it genuinely comes down to who you are and what you need from painting right now.

For me, I've found that I enjoy painting most when I focus on everything but the result. That mindset has been under pressure from many directions very often. It’s precisely for this reason that we’re doing the ‘Palette Cleanser Event’ on my Patreon right now.

We’ll dedicate the month of June to painting for ourselves and to enjoy a breath of fresh air in-between more demanding projects. If you’d like to join, I’d love to have you. The event takes place on the Patreon-exclusive discord that you can join when you sign up on my page. 

I hope to see you there!

Painting for joy // Malte