Painting from Life

What's so great about painting from life? About going out into the world and trying to represent it?

One answer is that painting the world-out-there takes you out of yourself.
When you're looking outward, you're not the focus. The world is. You're still swept up in the flood of time like everybody else. But while you're painting you're entirely present, wrestling with the world and turning it into beauty and meaning. You're not drifting in the stupor of the day-to-day and you’re not thinking about yourself.

Another answer is that the world pushes back at you.
Painting from life is so much better than painting from photographs because it's so much more demanding. The difficulty is what makes it worth doing, and the painting is energized by the struggle.
Nothing holds still! The sun moves, the model shifts, the still life wilts, but like us, a painting is made from this disappearing world.
In its way, painting from life is like creating memory, assembling a lingering sensation out of all that passing time.

Without that engagement with the world and without the challenge of time, you don't have anything to work with. That's one of the reasons that painting from photos is boring to do and boring to look at.
Painting from life is vitalizing, and when the painting succeeds, that life stays with it. That's what makes it worthwhile.

It's not exactly an antidote to anomie, to melancholy, to transience. But it does sweeten it.