Last Wednesday, I painted my kitchen window.
Not the window itself. A small watercolor of it — the one above the sink, the one with the frame that swells in the rain and the caulking I keep meaning to replace. Forty minutes, maybe. I mixed four colors, which is three more than I needed. The radiator under the counter was making its particular November sound, a kind of asthmatic ticking I have come to associate with being warm enough to work. My phone sat on the table behind me, face down, buzzing with notifications I had stopped reading two hours earlier.
The news was bad. I will not specify how because it does not matter. The news has been bad long enough that specifying which badness feels arbitrary, like pointing at a specific raindrop during a storm. But that morning, it was bad in a way that made me feel reading about it was a duty and painting while ignoring it was a kind of desertion.
I painted anyway.
The watercolor is not good. A small, slightly muddy rendering of a window I look through every day, and it will never be shown to anyone. Not the kind of thing worth showing. But while I was painting it, I did not think about the news, or the notifications, or the client email from the previous afternoon I had not yet answered. I thought about the color of the light coming through the glass at that particular hour, which is a thin, reluctant gray that almost matches the paper. I thought about how to make the window frame look like wood without using brown, which is a small problem that does not matter and is therefore the only kind of problem that helps.
When I finished, I set the painting on the counter and looked at it for a while. Then I felt guilty.
The guilt that arrives after the making stops
The guilt was not about the painting. The painting was fine — unremarkable, private, the kind of thing that exists in the category of things I made because my hands needed to move. The guilt was about the fact that I had spent forty minutes in something close to absorption while the world was doing whatever it was doing, and that I had not checked my phone, and that I did not want to check my phone, and that the not-wanting felt like a kind of callousness.
I have spoken about this guilt with other freelance creatives, and it is always described the same way: a vague, shapeless shame that arrives not during the making but after. While you are working, you are inside something. The shame cannot reach you there. It waits until you set the brush down and re-enter the version of reality where you are a person with a phone and a responsibility to be informed, and then it says: So you made a little picture while all of that was happening. How nice for you.
The shame is specific to people who make things, I think. It is not the same as the general anxiety of living in a bad news cycle. It is the particular discomfort of having done something small and private and pleasurable during a time when the cultural expectation is that you should be doing something large and public and useful. Or at least paying attention, which has become the secular equivalent of prayer — a thing you do to demonstrate that you care, even though it changes nothing.
The pressure to justify making
What I have noticed about this guilt is that it tries to solve itself by making the work productive. The guilt wants me to believe the painting would have been okay if it had been about something. If I had painted the window as a metaphor — isolation, observation, the thin membrane between private life and public catastrophe — then the forty minutes would have been justified. The guilt is not opposed to making things. It is opposed to making things for no reason.
This is the same logic I reject when it comes from clients who want me to explain why a commission is worth my rate, or from the productivity-adjacent corners of the internet that insist every creative act must be legible as work. The logic says: if you are making something, it should be going somewhere. Building toward a portfolio piece, a product, a post. It should be for something. And if it is not for something, you should at least be able to explain why it was worth doing, in terms that would make sense to someone who does not make things.
I do not think my kitchen window painting was worth doing. I do not think it was not worth doing. I think those categories do not apply, and the fact that I reach for them is evidence of how deeply the logic of productivity has colonized even the parts of my life that are supposed to be resistant to it. Even my guilt is hustling. Even my shame thinks I should be optimizing.
Professional organizations have articulated related concerns about the conditions under which creative work is valued and judged. The Authors Guild, for instance, has framed authorship as rooted in original voice, thinking, and creativity rather than output or productivity — a distinction that feels almost radical in a culture that increasingly treats creative work as interchangeable content. Their guidance on what constitutes authentic creative practice acknowledges that the value of creative work is constantly being negotiated against external pressures, both technological and economic. I read their position as an institutional recognition of something I feel acutely as an individual: that the conditions under which creative work is made, and the reasons it is made, are under constant pressure to justify themselves in terms that have nothing to do with why the work began in the first place.
The moment naming changes the work
There is a specific point at which the self-consciousness enters, and I have begun to notice it with some precision. Not during the making. During the naming.
The watercolor sat on my counter for two days before I thought about what to call it. I did not need to call it anything. It was a painting of my kitchen window. It did not require a title because it was not going anywhere. But I caught myself, while washing dishes next to it, thinking about what I would call it if I were to share it. Kitchen Window, November. Too literal. Morning Light (With Radiator). Too cute. Untitled (Window). Too artful, too obviously a choice to not choose.
The moment I started thinking about the title, the painting changed. It was no longer a private object that existed because I had wanted to spend forty minutes looking at light. It had become a potential public object, and the question of what it was for had entered the room. The title was the doorway through which self-consciousness walked in and sat down at the table.
This is not a grand observation. A small one. But I think it is the mechanism by which the guilt operates. The guilt does not arrive when I am painting. It arrives when I start to think about the painting as something that might be seen, which is also the moment it becomes something that might be judged, and therefore something that needs a justification. The private act of making does not require a justification. The public act of showing does. And the naming is where the private becomes the public, or at least where the possibility of the public enters and changes the private.
I have talked about this with other illustrators and writers, and the experience is remarkably consistent. The work is free until you have to name it. The naming is where the self-consciousness creeps in — where the private sketch becomes something you might share, and the tension of that possibility changes the work itself. I have found that even practical naming tools, which exist to lower the barrier of that anxiety, can confirm how fraught the moment is. I have looked at tools that generate book title ideas for writing projects I am not even sure I will finish, and the relief of having a starting point — any starting point — is real, but it is also a reminder that the naming tension is common enough to have generated its own ecosystem of solutions. The Reedsy book title generator is one such tool, and its own documentation notes that even Fitzgerald went through a dozen titles before landing on the right one, which is either comforting or depressing depending on how much you already know about Fitzgerald’s process. The generator’s creators are honest about the fact that the tool is better at sparking a direction than landing a final answer, which is a way of saying that the naming anxiety cannot be solved by a tool, only nudged along. The tool gives you a door. You still have to walk through it, and you still have to deal with what is on the other side.
What the hands needed
Here is what I keep coming back to. My hands needed something to do that morning that was not scrolling. That is the whole justification, and it is not enough, and I do not think it needs to be enough.
I have read enough about the neuroscience of flow states and the therapeutic benefits of making things to know there are respectable frameworks for understanding why painting a window while the news is bad might be not only acceptable but actively healthy. I could frame the painting as self-care, which is a term I dislike because it has been absorbed into the same productivity logic it was supposed to resist. Self-care has become a thing you do in order to keep working, which means it is not rest. It is maintenance. The difference between rest and maintenance is the difference between lying down because you are tired and lying down because your back will hurt tomorrow if you do not. Both are reasonable. Only one is actually rest.
I could also frame the painting as a form of witness. A small act of attention paid to the immediate, physical world during a time when attention is being demanded by the distant, digital one. This framing is more appealing to me because it does not require the painting to be productive. It only requires it to be attentive. But even this framing feels like a justification, and I am suspicious of justifications, because they imply that the thing being justified would not stand on its own.
What if the painting does not stand on its own? What if it is just a small, muddy watercolor of a window that nobody will ever see, made by a person who was avoiding his phone? I think I am okay with that. I think the painting does not need to be more than what it is, and the reason I think this is that making it felt different from not making it. Not better. Not worse. Different. My hands were occupied. My attention was in the room. The radiator was ticking. The light was gray. For forty minutes, I was not performing citizenship. I was mixing colors and looking at a window.
The painting exists and the news is still bad
I do not have a conclusion about whether making beautiful things during bad times is defensible. It probably is. I do not think the defense is interesting. The interesting thing is the guilt itself, and the way it tries to recruit the making into a system of justification that I would recognize as toxic if it came from a client or a productivity blog.
When the guilt says you should have been reading the news instead, it is saying that attention is a moral obligation and that making things is a leisure activity that must yield to that obligation. When the guilt says at least paint something that matters, it is saying that creative work must be legible as productive to be worthwhile. Both arguments come from the same place: the assumption that time is a resource that must be spent on the most important thing, and that the most important thing is always the thing that is loudest and most public.
I do not think this is true. I think the most important thing is sometimes the quietest and most private. I think painting a window you look through every day can be a way of paying attention to your own life, which is not the same as ignoring the world. It is a way of remembering that you live in a body, in a room, in a specific light, and that this is not nothing. It is not a political act. It is not resistance. It is just a man in a small apartment in Portland, painting a window because his hands needed something to do that was not scrolling.
The painting is on my counter. The news is still bad. The radiator is still ticking. I am going to leave the painting untitled, because titling it would be the first step toward making it for someone, and it was not for anyone. It was barely for me. It was for the forty minutes, and for the gray light, and for the small problem of how to paint a window frame without using brown.
I do not feel better about the news. I do not feel better about the painting. I feel the way you feel after doing something small and private that nobody asked for: neither proud nor ashamed, exactly. Just present. Just a person who made a thing and then stopped making it and then sat with it for a while in a warm room.
The guilt is still there. Sitting at the table, waiting for me to start thinking about the title again. I am not going to. I am going to wash the brush, which is a real brush that needs to be washed, and then I am going to read the news, because I live in the world and I am not pretending otherwise. But I am going to read it as a person who spent forty minutes this morning looking at light, and I do not think that makes me less capable of caring. I think it might make me more capable of staying, which is different from being informed, and which is the thing I am actually trying to figure out.
The window is still there. The painting is still there. The light at four in the afternoon is already fading, and by the time I finish writing this, it will be dark, and the radiator will be louder, and the news will be whatever it is by then. I am going to leave the painting where it is. I am not going to title it. I am not going to share it. I am not going to justify it. I am just going to let it be what it is, which is a small thing a person made on a bad day, for no reason, with his hands.
