I’m quoting The Hardly Boys film by William Wegman here. But that feels appropo on days like these, when one might feel compelled to paint the same scene over and over and over in some attempt to get it right. Here they are:
One place I have been lately, is in my studio, a place where I never ever felt that I could possibly spend enough time. My studio is chock full of art supplies, paper, unfinished projects, etc., and I had a running joke with myself that if I were ever locked inside, I could not possibly use up all the supplies I had. Whoever would have guessed that this would more or less come to pass?
So I set out to try and try and at least use up the watercolor paper I had on hand, and started painting really quick gestural wet-on-wet landscapes, using pen, gouache, Daler-Rowney acrylic ink, and India ink. My husband calls them “scratch paintings.”
Sometimes I work from my photos, and sometimes I page through photos on Flickr, painting places where I have never physically been, but now at least have virtually been, thanks to the generosity of many fine photographers.
While I have been painting, I have been listening to Dorothy Dunnet’s The Lymond Chronicles (my second time through this series), which has been incredibly transporting. As a result, I have knocked out about a zillion of these things, and feel compelled to keep going, even though I am starting to feel like Jack Nicholson in The Shining, except that instead of boxes of typewritten pages, I have boxes of watercolor paintings.
I recently sat at my dining room table and just knocked out a bunch of these little paintings, just for the sake of practice. Sometimes I get into a kind of groove and out of maybe 16 sketches, came up with a few that I like. The are a manifestation of wanderlust, which I more or less constantly have.
I worked out in my back yard a few weeks ago, and just whipped out a ton of stuff, following one idea after another. I always end up doing patterns, as a former textile design student. Out of that pile of stuff, these were the two pieces that I liked the best (below).
It took me four years to paint like Raphael, but a lifetime to paint like a child.
— Pablo Picasso
I’m pretty sure I heard that on Jeopardy recently, and I can’t believe I hadn’t heard it before. Or maybe I had, but it hadn’t resonated with me the way it did last week, because as I have been painting with my nephew Lyle lately (who turns 4 this week), I’ve been learning how to think less and just follow an idea. There is much to be learned by watching a kid just fire stuff off.
Last week when I was visiting, I brought another set of watercolors. We have a routine now where we work on a piece together. (He insists upon it.) We knocked out a bunch of butterflies and moths like this one:
Water was spilled. We had a giant wet piece of newspaper we were working on, then Lyle got inspired to run his wet hand across the watercolor set and went berserk making this piece while I watched in horror (for the watercolor set), then fascination.
I had to restrain myself from just immediately trying to reign him in, but I did try to explain that the watercolors would probably all be tinted with black from now on. However, I ran a quick mono print on the set to reclaim it a little. Then we did seven more of these.
