I recently spoke to my brother about the process of making art. He has been a composer of modern music for 30 years. I am a novice painter. I told him that after a year of working six hours a day, I felt like I had nothing completed.

He asked me, "Well, do you enjoy painting? Making art?" I paused and asked him, "Do you?" "Well, not really, but it is marginally better than the alternative. Better than not making music." I asked him how many of his compositions he really liked. Without hesitation, he responded, "Three."

Every day, I find myself walking down to the studio in my garage asking myself, "What is the point? Why am I doing this again?" Then every two or three weeks, I will see something I have made—a brush stroke, a combination of colors, a shape that looks like nothing and, at the same time, a perfect representation of an object or figure. And I think, "Oh, that is not terrible." This feeling usually lasts just a few minutes, and then the doubt returns.

I think this is how surfers must feel. They get up at dawn and wait day after day for weeks or months for that wave or part of a wave that makes all the waiting and work worthwhile.

Thomas Wolfgang Broening