By Esther C. Baird, first published in the Ipswich Local News on Nov 3, 2022
Regular readers may recall that in the early pandemic days, I created an “art block” for our daily home-bound schedule.
We expressed our hopes and dreams and growing claustrophobia through landscapes and still lifes and an unfortunate incident painting (“Bunnies in a Meadow”).
And then two years went by. I kept hoping to return to watercolors. I was terrible at it, certainly, but I’d found it calming … and not much calms me.
So, this year, when my friend who often appears in this column as my Voice of Reason (VOR), suggested we take a painting class, I jumped at the chance.
We are both Type A, but it is expressed in such a way that I am okay with a bit of chaos and she brings a natural order to all situations.
We both get there on time (fine — we get there early), but I’ll shove my notes into a grocery bag I found in my car, and she will have hers nicely filed in a bag that fits the occasion.
So we took the class.
“Today we are working on washes,” our teacher informed us. I smugly started covering my paper in water because I was an expert.
I spent eight weeks painting watercolors via YouTube, so I knew ALL about washes.
“There are a variety of washes, so let’s just start with a few squares — we’ll try a different technique in each one. Wet on wet, dry on wet and, of course, glazing.”
Of course.
Only my entire paper was covered in water, making distinct squares impossible. My friend who, sigh, followed the rules, had little squares of water.
But when I pushed my paint around, it bled all over the paper. Also, my colors were fiery and vibrant, not the calm colors others seemed to be achieving.
I was painting an impression of a sunset that crashed into a volcano. My VOR painted eight lovely squares in various shades of peace and serenity.
But it was fine, because, as the teacher explained, “The water will do what it wants. The paint will move around, and the less you try to control it, the better.”
Control?
Exactly. I didn’t need to pretend to be in control of one more thing. I tried daily to control teenagers and large dogs and knew only madness lay that way.
Let the blue bleed down the page and mix erratically with the yellow, creating a gross muddy color (not, by the way, the green my grade-school art teacher promised).
Who cared? My colors were free! I was free! I would learn to surf! I’d learn Spanish! I would never cook dinner again or carpool or …
“Today, we’re going to work on light and dark by sketching a barn. You’ll need to follow these instructions step by step.” Our teacher announced.
Step by step? That hardly felt free. I looked at my friend’s emerging barn-scape looking, you know, barny. We had to layer (or the ever-popular “glaze” technique, if you’d like to know the proper term, as I’m sure you do) the paint on in some spots but not in others, so that the barn would increasingly develop shadows all by using only one color. Colors such as a soothing, Caribbean-sea blue or smoking, burnt-pumpkin-pie orange. You can decide who created what.
“My problem is, for starters, I can’t draw a barn.” I whispered to my friend. This was despite the fact that we’d been instructed to trace our barns. Let’s not pretend tracing helps.
It involves a lot of charcoal, which I proceeded to get on myself, but barely on the paper (let alone in the shape of a barn). My cupola looked like a piece of melted chocolate that had inexplicably fallen out of the sky. Let’s leave charcoal for the Webers, shall we?
Sensing my growing, um, mood, the VOR, always ready with a solution, said, “Well then, we need to learn how to draw.”
I nodded. She said it so authoritatively that it was obvious she was right.
So next week we start “Drawing for Curious Beginners.” And sure, I’m curious — but mostly I don’t have high expectations (except that I know we’ll both be on time).