Four short lines, and the first thing that catches the eye is a small contradiction. The title announces "Artist", yet the only person the poem actually names is a "non artist". The whole piece lives in the gap between those two labels. Its central idea seems to be that the gap is narrower than we assume: someone who paints their feelings without knowing what art is may be doing exactly what an artist does.
Start with the verb. "You paint your feelings" is a bold sentence when you stop to think about it. Feelings have no colour, no edges and no weight, while paint has all three. To paint a feeling is to turn something invisible into something you can look at, and the poem treats this as a plain, almost casual act. There are no adjectives and no drama, just "you paint". The second-person address matters too. "You" could be a friend being watched, a reader being spoken to, or the speaker talking to themselves. The poem doesn't say, and that openness lets almost any reader step into the pronoun.
The simile is the most interesting spot because of its grammar. "Like a non artist / Trying to figure out / What art is." Who is trying to figure it out, the "you" or the non-artist the "you" resembles? Probably both, and the poem seems happy to let the two blur. The phrase "non artist" deserves a pause as well. It has no hyphen and none of the softer words like "beginner" or "amateur", only a flat label defined by what it lacks. It sounds like something a person might say about themselves, half apologetic. Yet the figure it describes is busy painting. They lack the title but not the activity, so the poem quietly separates being an artist from feeling like one, and suggests the doing comes first.
The sound of the poem works against neat expectations. Nothing rhymes: "feelings", "artist", "out" and "is" scatter their endings. Instead the poem repeats a root. "Artist" in the title, "artist" in line two and "art" in line four keep coming back, as if the question were being circled rather than answered. The rhythm is just as loose. Counting syllables gives five, five, six and three. The first two lines are balanced, then "Trying to figure out" stretches and stumbles a little, like someone feeling their way along a wall. The last line shrinks to "What art is", which lands like a shrug or a full stop at the end of a long thought.
The line breaks add to the effect. "Figure out" hangs at the end of line three, so we wait a beat for its object, just as the person being described waits for an answer. "Figure out" is also a homely, everyday phrase, nowhere near the grand vocabulary usually attached to art, such as genius, beauty or inspiration. The whole poem stays in small, ordinary words, and that suits its subject. It describes the search for art without dressing itself up as art.
Then there is the ending. The poem finishes on "is", a verb with nothing after it, the weakest word in the sentence given the strongest position. The question is asked and never answered, and the poem doesn't even point towards an answer. The present tense of "paint" and "trying" keeps the scene unfinished. Figuring out what art is, the poem implies, is not a stage you pass through on the way to becoming an artist. It is the permanent condition of being one.
That is where the poem's significance lies. Many people hesitate to call their own creative attempts art because they lack training, confidence or a sense of the rules. The poem answers that hesitation by changing the definition. The honest effort to put a feeling into paint, while admitting you don't know what you're doing, is the artist's position, and perhaps the most truthful one. The poem also does what it describes: it is four plain lines trying to say what art is, "like a non artist", and it leaves the question open.
The tone remains open too. "Like a non artist" could be gentle encouragement or gentle teasing, and the poem doesn't settle it. Read it aloud both ways and see which one you believe. The ambiguity is part of the pleasure.