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[...]when I leaned back to wipe the sweat from my brow, expecting to experience Michelangelo's satisfaction after unearthing David's finger from the marble, I found instead a hideous mess of crisscrossed black lines forming indecipherable blobs, dotted with jagged explosions of artificial color. The "art" I ambitiously tried to make on the rudimentary software - a blank canvas equipped with bare-bones tools like pencil, brush, eraser - was sometimes satirical, mimicking my favorite cartoonists Berkeley Breathed or Nicholas Gurewitch; other times it echoed the hostile geographies of J.R.R. Tolkien and Hiromu Arakawa. After years of admiring beige topographic models of cities and states at highway rest stops, playing board games like Risk and Omaha Beachhead and poring over my brother's dog-eared atlases, I wanted to become a cartographer of new worlds on Paint.
My generation may be the last to have childhood memories of a family "computer room" - though ours was really more of a computer nook: a perpetually dark, narrow corner, packed with tangled wires and plug-in speakers, discarded tchotchkes, dusty dishware and tumbleweeds of dog hair. This was also my sanctuary.
Straining my eyes against the unnatural glow of our boxy PC, I'd throw my heart and soul into what I envisioned as singularly brilliant artwork produced from an underappreciated genius mind. With my hand cramping on the mouse, I'd push my face close to the glass of the monitor so I could devote brain-surgeon levels of concentration. And when I leaned back to wipe the sweat from my brow, expecting to experience Michelangelo's satisfaction after unearthing David's finger from the marble, I found instead a hideous mess of crisscrossed black lines forming indecipherable blobs, dotted with jagged explosions of artificial color. Saving the monstrosity as "Untitled.bmp," I'd close Microsoft Paint and retire for the day, knowing that my work was far from over.
MS Paint dominated my adolescence in the early 2000s. The "art" I ambitiously tried to make on the rudimentary software - a blank canvas equipped with bare-bones tools like pencil, brush, eraser - was sometimes satirical, mimicking my favorite cartoonists Berkeley Breathed or Nicholas Gurewitch; other times it echoed the hostile geographies of J.R.R. Tolkien and Hiromu Arakawa. I had a particular passion for creating imaginary city maps - intricate, brick-and-iron-laden municipalities divided into commercial, industrial and residential zones. After years of admiring beige topographic models of cities and states at highway rest stops, playing board games like Risk and Omaha Beachhead and poring over my brother's dog-eared atlases, I wanted to become a cartographer of new worlds on Paint.
The results of my struggles - using basic copy-and-pastes of three-pixel-wide buildings to convey urban sprawl, for instance - never turned out how I imagined at the onset. But Paint held sway over me - not because it was secretly great, but because it was so obviously crappy. My creations became admirable because of their extreme effort. Jury-rigging rain clouds out of trapezoids, or hairdos with spray-can bursts, just made the satisfaction sweeter. If you could figure out a way to show it in Paint, you could figure out a way to show it anywhere. If nothing else, you felt the rare satisfaction of genuinely trying.
I recently took a trip to Best Buy, where puzzled employees watched me use a $2,000 top-of-the-line Lenovo desktop to pull up Paint and once again draw these asymmetrical grids and unsightly stick figures. It had been nearly a decade since I last opened the program, after finally relinquishing to pressure to be a functioning adult and use Adobe Photoshop on company-issued MacBooks. I expected to find the software unrecognizable in its sophistication. But to my delight, I was met with the familiar simple tool bar. In five minutes, I used imperfect lines to sketch the outline of a rough cube that quickly became the frame of an even rougher house.
Eventually I became curious about a couple of buttons I didn't recognize - including one called Image Creator, powered by OpenAI's text-to-image A.I., which Microsoft claims can "help you unleash your creativity." I prompted it to generate "a map of a city on a river," and received back the sort of technically proficient but utterly generic graphic that you might find hanging on the wall of a Days Inn. It unleashed my creativity about as much as buying a Twix bar from a vending machine would make me a pastry chef.
I'm not the only one unimpressed with the glittery new features. Image Creator has been met with annoyance from Paint lovers. And in 2017, when Microsoft tried to sunset Paint in favor of the feature-rich "Paint 3D," vocal dissent from fans persuaded the company to nix that plan. The internet, meanwhile, is full of old-fashioned Paint emulators. I think the reason all these tech developments can't complete with O.G. Paint is that artistic skill isn't the same thing as artistic expression. (The legendary Japanese filmmaker Hayao Miyazaki summed it up perfectly, in one of my favorite YouTube clips, in his response to a showcase of AL animation: "I am utterly disgusted... I strongly feel this is an insult to life itself")
Art made on Paint is often amateurish, but amateurish in a way that celebrates human flaw. Struggling to make something out of nothing - to pull an image from the mind, to represent it externally in a way that is even halfway decent - is as quintessentially human as speaking a language. And by being a digital (i.e. deletable) canvas, Paint also skirts the burdens of physical art; free in the knowledge that you can restart at any point, you might find it easier to be genuinely innovative and weird and silly. Simply by opening Paint, you're earning a pass from perfection. You don't have to be a kid to appreciate that.
Focusing body and mind on one simple intention like drawing a map on Paint can be meditative, a way of achieving mindfulness, as well. And there are many well-researched creative benefits to constraint - which I've also witnessed in my work as a writing instructor. Next time you find yourself with some free time on a Windows computer, I recommend you open the machine's dinkiest little graphics program and see what you can pull off with some squiggly lines and a color-fill feature. Doing it photo-realistically or quickly isn't why we do it. Like trying to skip a stone, sometimes it's just fun to see if we can do it at all.
Copyright New York Times Company Oct 27, 2024