Watercolor

I have to share my watercolor class experience on here because I know that every one of you have had an experience like this before.  When all is said and done the reaction to such classes range from 'Never again!", to "Maybe one more try....", to "I love this!"  Halfway through this watercolor session I have managed to experience all of the above reactions and many more along with them.  But the best reaction so far is uninhibited laughter.  Just goes to show you that I have no doubt that I was not borne into any artistic talent.  Clearly that gift was wrapped and delivered to someone else.  I know this because of the instructor I have tells me how good my work is.  Because that is her job.  She wants me to keep trying.  She knows I won't try if I am not given positive feedback about my painting skills.  She has worked with Pavlov's dog somewhere along the line, too, I just know it.

She is a good artist and has certainly developed a style that is unique and recognizable.  I know her work when I see it, without question.  To me, that is part of the gift.  Lots of people can draw or paint by copying pictures.  But to have your own style - that one way of doing things that makes a piece clearly your own - is something I feel truly marks someone as an artist. 

What makes this instructor even better is her unrelenting ability to look at what someone has done and be able to make them believe that they are onto something!  To express a comment about something so incredibly mediocre or just downright awful and yet instill a sense of accomplishment in the pupil - well, that is an art too.  In fact, it's an art that I, myself, am quite capable of, so the time we critique is most amusing.  Nothing more fun than trying to BS a BSer!

Allow me to walk you through one of our sessions.  We begin each class (all 6 of us) gathering around the instructors work table and watching her do a technique while explaining it.  Naturally it is never just a direct, " Do this, then this, then that and you're done."  We have to get off on tangents and into stories.  Some of those stories don't even have anything to do with the technique, yet there we stand in rapt attention until we come back around to the task at hand and she releases us to our own tables to get to work.

In my mind I try to see myself doing just what she says to do - moving my wrist just so or loading my brush just right, dragging the paint across the paper to create the affect she has demonstrated. Oh!  It's perfection!  I can do that, I can do that! And off I go, all enthusiasm and lofty ambitions....and ten minutes later I look at what I have done and the world has become a place for joksters and BSers. 

The instructor moves around the room checking our progress and giving encouraging corrections and positive comments. When she gets to my table I cannot look up at first for the grin on my face reveals how I really feel about my work in front of me as well as what is about to come out of her mouth.  I take a deep breath, lose the grin, and look up for "approval". Oh. My. Lord.  This is what she says," Oh, Ther-e-sa!  That is really a good job! Your lines are wonderful and I love the color you've laid down! That color just makes that picture sing."

I look down at my painting and do my own critique in my mind.  "Oh Theresa! What have you done!?  Why, I don't think I have ever seen a piece of ginger root ever painted quite so well before, you may have found a niche here...oh....what's that?....it's upside down?  ....oh, it's a tree?  Oh my, well aren't you something?! "  Oh hell yes, I am. 

In fact, my talent is abounding all over my table.  I have six used brushes laying in three different places. I have a ball of paper towel the size of a soccerball and just as heavy because I seem to feel the need to put my brush on it after every single dip in the water.  All of my paint, which started out in pretty little dabs of solid, bright colors have migrated into the center of the pallette and are now morphed into a putrid shade of muddy green-brown.  The pallette is on the right side of the table and the water is on the left.  For some reason the thumbnail of my right hand is blue and the left one has red underneath it...and I didn't even use the red.  Okay, I know, should have taken a course on the uber-basics of painting - like how to set up.

But this doesn't bother me because every single painting created by this left hand of mine and that miracle of creative resource known as my mind's eye has put pictures before me that bring me nothing but sheer joy in the laughter they evoke every time I see them.  I have trees that look better as ginger root if you turn them upside down.  I have fish that began their life on paper swimming (and looking reasonably good) through the ocean only to be sat down on the sandy bottom because of my talent at placing seaweed directly beneath their bellies and painting it going up instead of down.  My flecks of spotty color created by shaving watercolor pencils have been blown away in one breath because I didn't leave the paper wet enough. Those that did remain on the paper have bloomed into tie-dye looking blobs in places where blobs don't belong reminding me of the days of picture prints when the developing machine went haywire.  My mountains look more like landscapes from other planets and my trees become black fuzz bombs on an alien plain. However, my skies aren't too bad; they do look sky-like, even to me! It's a miracle! Now if I could just remember how I did that....

The best part of this whole thing is the fun and joy it brings!  Sure I suck, but that's okay, I'm getting a kick out of it and diversifying my knowledge (and appreciation) of art.  When it gets to the point where I cannot laugh anymore, when I cannot learn anything new, and when I dread the thought of making a messy worktable, that is when I will quit.  For now, I am just going with the flow - being that artist my instructor leads me to believe I am.  Yeah...it's like that.