Let me tell you what you don't see on Instagram.
You don't see the canvas I stared at for twenty minutes before I touched it. You don't see the layer I hated so much I painted over it completely and started again from gray. You don't see the afternoon I mixed six different combinations of medium and pigment just to see what would happen - not because I had a painting in mind, but because I needed to know what they'd do together when no one was watching.
You see the finished piece, lit beautifully, looking like it always kenew what it was going to be.
It didn't. None of them do.
Here's what actually happens when I walk into the studio.
First, music. Always music. Blues, R&B, pop, whatever I woke up feeling that morning - my taste is as layered and unpredictable as the paintings, and I'm not sorry about that. The music isn't background. It's permission. It shifts something in me before I ever pick up a brush. It says: you're not here to be productive. You're here to feel.
Then I stand in front of whatever I'm working on and I just - look. Sometimes for a long time. I'm not planning. I'm listening. There's a difference.
Planning is about controlling where things go. Listening is about paying attention to where they want to go. After years of trying to control it, I finally learned that listening gets me somewhere real a lot faster.
Then I start playing.
That's the only word for it. I'm a mad scientist in there. I'm asking questions the whole time - what happens if I pour this over that? What does this dry pigment do when it hits wet acrylic? What if I use this stencil here and drag through it before it dries? What if I break that rule - the one about not mixing these two mediums - and just see what happens?
A lot of what happens is a mess. Genuinely. Some combinations fight each other. Some layers do exactly the opposite of what I expected. Some afternoons I clean up and walk out with nothing I'd ever show anyone.
And then there are the other days.
The other days are why I do all of it.
The other days are when something happens that I couldn't have planned. A pigment bleeds into a layer underneath it and creates a depth I didn't see coming. A color I almost covered up turns out to be the thing that makes the whole painting honest. I step back and there it is - something real, something that came from the process rather than the plan, something I couldn't have arrived at any other way.
Those are the paintings that end up on the wall. Not because they're perfect. Because they're true.
This is what intuitive painting actually means. It's not mystical. It's not effortless. It's showing up, turning on the music, making a mess, breaking the rules on purpose, and staying present long enough for something worth keeping to emerge.
I think about this when I see those flawless Instagram feeds. The ones where every painting looks inevitable, polished, like it arrived fully formed. Maybe some artists work that way. I don't. And I don't think most of them do either.
The trial and error isn't the cost of making the work. It is the work.
The learning how mediums behave together, the reactions you can't predict, the accidents that teach you more than any intentional mark - that's where the painting actually lives. The finished piece is just what it looks like when you finally stop.
So if you're waiting for the version where you walk in knowing exactly what you're doing - I'm going to save you some time.
That version doesn't exist. Start the music. Make the mess. See what happens.
-- Kim
This piece is part of The In-Between - studio dispatches and honest writing from Kim Depa Studio. Subscribe at kimdepastudio.com/the-in-between