I’m looking at a wall of four paintings in process, all on paper. Each is developing in a different direction from the others.

Number 1 began with two big watercolor splatters emerging from a baseline on a 22 x 30″ sheet. I’m continuing with oil, choosing some splatter elements and partially covering up the rest. Large graphic-like forms are emerging.

Number 2 began with a tracing around my hand and arm. My hands are small, like shrunken versions of my father’s, and my wrists are willowy, and they’ve always felt like someone else’s to me. I filled in the traced hand with swaths of color. There were other elements in the painting, too, and I began cutting into and shaping them with black, like the old joke about trimming a mustache, until now the entire sheet is under a film of black. The hand and arm show faintly, as a wash of lighter tone. I may go in next with oil pastel; we’ll see.

Painting 3 began as a white sheet with a baseline, with a yellow balloon-like form and an indigo city silhouette rising out of the baseline, and black and red balloon-like forms emerging from the top, all on white. I cut into it yesterday with sky-blue bars, bending them around the balloon forms, and arching over the top. It’s working for me. When the paint dries I’ll return with something else.

4 began as a continuation of a short series in which a large organic form takes up the top right 3/5 of the image. I really liked this series, and was annoyed when, in this iteration, the form broke up into maybe a dozen red mountains, with a yellow river crashing down through them. I was annoyed at first, anyway, until I was intrigued. Surprises are good, after all. Truth be told, I work for them. Surprises keep me in the air. So now I’m thinking about a form at the bottom left, at the end of that wide-looping river that comes crashing out of the mountains.

The point of bringing all this up is those four paintings don’t look or behave similarly, like good siblings. Casual observers might even think they were painted by four different artists. This sibling expectation is what you’re trained on in art school. It’s the prevailing expectation art-world gatekeepers have of serious artists.

Disregarding for a moment the iconic artists who defy this approach, the mindset that all of an artist’s works must resemble one another has nothing to do with art. It’s about marketing, and bowing to simple-minded public expectation. And it denies the way healthy, curious, creative minds work.

The implication of the sibling-art requirement is that artists should work to find a signature approach to art-making, and then iterate this approach endlessly, because after years of development, this now is their real, authentic art. Not whatever they were doing before. Artists who don’t make works that clearly, easily resemble one another shouldn’t be taken seriously, according to this mindset.

It’s wretched, of course. The bodies of work leading up to the artist’s signature style scream from the closets and portfolios, “What are we, chopped liver?” They’re considered subsidiary at best, and rubbish at worst. It’s a very mid-20th-century mindset.

Worst of all, this thinking centers art-world climbing and attention-getting. It turns all the art we see into art of, by, and for the institution. It’s institution-first art, made not from the needs of the artist, made not to relate to the lives of day-to-day people. It’s made from career aspiration, to fit within the programs of gallerists, to fill giant museum and mansion walls. This art exists to praise the institution, and the oligarchs who fuel it and run it.

I’ve enjoyed art institutions, museums for example, all my life, and it’s always fun to stumble into a luxury hotel lobby or even to be invited to some oligarch’s soiree and see big, spectacular, sometimes even recognizable art on the walls. I only wish I possessed hands-on comprehension of how art gets into any of these places.

Which is to say, I understand that there’s an entire institutional apparatus in which wealthy art dealers zero in on artists they’re sure they can sell, and then they contract with and promote those artists to other wealthy people, often as investments. What I have no comprehension of is how any of that attention is ever gained for the artists. And I believe that’s the case because of my social and economic limitations first and foremost, and, secondly, that I don’t make art directed at the institution.

I wasn’t raised around people who made art, bought art, sold art, or gave art any serious attention. And in my socioeconomic journey through adulthood I’ve never become closely integrated into a wealthy community where such things take place. I’ve had a few minor associations over the years, but they quickly fizzled out. Ships passing in the night.

Still, these four different paintings keep urging me on. And I realize that, for all my limitations, what justifies these works-in-progress on my walls is that they’re not the art of institution, but the art of a life. An authentic life, filled and warped and stained by day jobs, cluttered to the rafters with people of every kind, scored by the slangs and dialects and fashions of speech and centuries of music, informed by art movies books TV shows, flavored by interests in every science involving looking, in music-making, in programming, cuisines of all kinds, it goes on and on.

I’ve managed to live a life crammed with rich experiences on a discount budget.

Maybe I’ll never make the Whitney Biennial, because of my inability to comprehend institutional access. But I can continue working with the faith that, even during times when my art looks like the work of four different artists, what I’m making is solid, of value, and authentic.

Unlike much of the contemporary art cultivated by the institution.