Above: Hewitt Callister’s painting palette in Berlin, 1989.
The Material Fight and the Fortunate Few
A painting should not come easily. If the surface lies there, smooth and obedient, waiting to be admired, then something has gone wrong. Art that submits too willingly to the artist’s will, or worse, to the audience’s expectations, has already failed. The best work carries the evidence of struggle, the marks of hesitation, the places where the material has pushed back.
I have always been drawn to painters who fight with their medium rather than bending it neatly to their ideas. You can see it in the work. A scraped-down canvas where an image was abandoned and rebuilt. A thick impasto that was not layered for effect, but because the first fifteen attempts at resolution were buried underneath. A mark that was not planned, but arrived by accident, stayed because it could not be undone, and forced the artist to react. This is where real painting happens, in the tension between control and surrender.
Too many artists today treat their materials as passive tools, as mere extensions of an intellectual exercise. I have no interest in this. I want to see the paint misbehave. I want to see an artist lose control, make a mistake, and then find a way to let that mistake live. If there is no risk, no uncertainty, no chance that the painting could have collapsed at any moment, then where is the urgency?
The best paintings do not sit quietly on a wall. They hold the energy of their making. They remind you that they could have gone another way, that the artist had to fight for them. That fight is what makes them alive.
But then there are the fortunate few. The paintings that arrive fully formed, as if they had been waiting for you to catch up. Every artist who has put in the years, who has fought with their own work long enough, knows this feeling. Once in a while, the painting paints itself. You move without thinking, the colours land where they should, the gestures feel inevitable. It is a rare gift, and it does not come to the lazy. It only happens after decades of failure, of scraping down, reworking, pushing through bad ideas, and surviving the long droughts where nothing feels right. Those lucky paintings are not luck at all. They are the reward for every other time the fight ended in a draw.
And yet, we live in a world that expects everything to come easily. The culture of shortcuts, fast answers, and frictionless production. People want instant gratification, not process. Art has become another lifestyle choice, another career path to optimize, another way to be visible rather than another way to disappear into something real.
I came up in a time when failure was a requirement, not a personal branding issue. The punks, the painters, the poets. None of us expected to get out unscathed. No one asked us for an artist statement explaining our trauma, no one expected us to sell out arenas, and no one gave a damn about our social media engagement. We made things because we had to, because the fight itself mattered. Now I watch younger artists struggle with the weight of an audience that expects perfection on the first try, a market that rewards style over substance, and an art world that tolerates rebellion only when it can be easily packaged.
The fight still matters. The fortunate paintings still come, but only if you put in the work. The real ones know this. The rest can keep chasing the shortcut. I will be in the studio, covered in paint, still waiting for the next fight.
Callister – 2025