Life and Beauty

Watercolour painting requires great patience, even a studiousness. If darkness is what you seek, you must first paint in a lighter, thinner version of that colour and allow it to dry before you add yet another thin layer, and layer upon layer until the proper shades and gradience and depth are achieved. One can't simply jump into it, for if one falters it can be very difficult to hide, particularly if it is a dark colour. All watercolour paintings require strategic thought, logic and planning, all while maintaining colour theory, which is of utmost importance when your medium is so very translucent--almost absent, even. And yet, so often, after this tedious, sometimes exhausting and usually frustrating quest your labour proves to be fruitless. Countless times does an artist begin with good intentions and stunning ideas, only to find themselves in a block, or a rut, or a loss of interest--another unfinished potential masterpiece.
Perhaps that is what it's all about. Perhaps an artist's life isn't based on the masterpiece that "makes" them, but the many incompletes that led to it. Perhaps the great series of inconclusive creative ambitions define the artist, moulding and shaping the mind and body and spirit of the person until the culmination of these ambitions and maybe even the actualisation of self are presented in the form of the magnum opus. An artist's soul is made up of pages half-empty, songs unwritten, brush strokes undefined. They say that all great art comes from suffering. Maybe it is this hopeless emptiness that makes up the artful human, that inspires work, that places audiences in awe.
This begs the question: is the satisfaction, the admiration, the accomplishment, the oneness and the peace that art embeds in us worth the deep and true pain experienced on the artist's behalf?
The answer is yes. It is worth it to see your work admired by others, be it to the whole of the world or in the poverty of your makeshift studio. It is worth it to know that others will look upon your work and feel the flames ignite within themselves to create works of their own. It is worth it to witness the universal nature of art, and how it unites even the most contrary of peoples. Most of all it is worth it to finally see all of your tragedy and hardship turn into something beautiful, to feel the sense of direction and reason it gives you and to see a part of yourself, your most tortured self, in a new light--as something noble and worthwhile--as art. To know that despite all the sorrow it may have taken to reach this point, you know you endured it with purpose and your endurance provided you with the gift of knowing yourself deeply.
A musician wrote that if life isn't beautiful without pain then he would rather never see beauty again, but I beg to differ.