Paint Your Life

Michelangelo Buonaroti is perhaps the greatest artist in history. The outstanding figure of Italian Renaissance lived from 1470 to 1564 and his genius has not stopped to inspire me as other millions across the world. He was reputed for his masterpiece, a ceiling painting for Rome’s famous Sistine Chapel that captures the dramatic story of creation in Genesis.
Being a leisure artist myself, of course not in the order of the Michelangelos and the Pablo Picassos, I think I have a hint of the difficulty involved in making a portrait. However, Michelangelo’s tasks was far more than making just a portrait or two; it involved 300 separate detailed portraits of men and women to cover 6,000 square feet of ceiling -  the size of about four average house roofs!
Between 1508 and 1512, this painstaking artist devoted all his energies to the exhausting strains of painting the vast overhead space with his tiny brush strokes. Sometimes he painted on a huge scaffold, a paintbrush high over his head; sometimes his nose inches from the ceiling. At other times, he painted lying on his back, and his shoulders, neck and arms cramped painfully.
In the long days of summer, he had sun light to paint 17 hours a day, taking his food and a chamber pot with him on the 60-foot scaffold. For 30 days at a stretch he was said to sleep in his cloths, not even taking off his boots. Paint trickled into his eyes so he could barely see. In winter’s cold and summer’s heat, he meticulously painted until at last the ceiling looked like a ceiling no more. He had finally transformed it into the creation drama, with creatures so real they seemed to breathe.
Thanks in part to Villanova University; you can now take a virtual, panoramic tour of the Chapel. Using buttons in the lower left screen, you can move around the room and zoom in on the paintings, including those on the ceiling.
Life is an art. Like Michelangelo, in a sense, we are all artists, painting our own lives’ portraits, consciously or unconsciously. Just as every single stroke of a painter’s brush adds up to create a grand piece, so every choice, action and reaction are woven together to form the image of a life that reveals the genius of one’s craftsmanship!
We are painters with full palette of colors to paint our lives with. Adolf Hitler painted his’ war; Nelson Mandela, freedom. What color have you chosen to paint your life? Only you can decide for yourself. Needless to say indecision is a decision – of course, to be a spectator in your own life’s game. But life is rather too short to monkey with. Just like Michelangelo didn’t have eternity to paint, you don’t have forever to live! No matter how enjoyable or unbearable you perceive your life as at the moment, someday, the final whistle will blow and that will be the end.
We have but a short breath of time here. Life soon ticks away and fads out like a gas fume into thin air. Therefore, every waking moment of our lives should be perceived and utilized as another opportunity to perfect the portrait we paint – the reason we live.
“Men’s works live after them.” At the end of the day, what really matters is whether or not you lived your life artfully to the fullest, and this will be clearly revealed by the portrait your life leaves behind when you are gone.