My fellow student Mrs. C was properly late to class so at first it felt like a private lesson. :) And after showing Ms. L my printouts she gives me a photograph and says "Let's do this one today." Oh, yeah, this will work too. (Were mine too simplistic? Too hard maybe? Don't read into it, go with it!)
Haha, how meta. Phsaw, yeah, I got this.
Where is my wine?
"Set up your palette. And I will be right back." Oh yeah, I can setup my palette, sure, er. Crap. How is that exactly? I soon discovered two reds, two yellows, two blues, two browns, and a large dollop of white constitutes a properly prepared painting palette. Heh. ;P Starting off with my washing of Yellow Ocher I followed the sketch I made of the photo, simplifying, but not redesigning, the image.
YES! This is why I am here. EDUCATION!!
Ms. L turned on a mix CD and for the next two hours, we painted. I got into it, asked questions here and there. "Turn both the photo and your canvas upside down to give you a better sense of shape and color." Insightful! Mrs. C finally showed up and worked on a painting she brought from home. "Where are the lights? Where are the shadows?" It was wonderful, and I felt in the zone. When I realized there was less than an hour left to paint, there came the pang of sadness, but... But, I'm not ready to stop! :'( Keep on keeping on. Still painting and talking, listening to music, their idle chatter making me feel younger than I have in a long time. Ms. L leans over me and tells me to stop putting lines in my painting.
*Tires Squeal* (I would almost swear you could smell rubber.)
Wait. Um, what? How can I not put lines on my painting; it is literally made of lines and curves, everywhere. She shows me a quick painting of the two pears from last week "See? No lines, just shapes and edges." Blink. Drool. Duh. I saw lines all over those pears. I saw lines between the colors and lines of each color from brush strokes all over the painting. So my patient instructor tries again. She grabs a pencil and draws a line on a piece of paper. "That's a line." Thank you, yes, we agree that is indeed a line. But that doesn't change the fact that I see lines on the pears and have NO idea what she means by stop painting lines on my canvas board. At this point I am beginning to feel the heat of frustration in my face and neck. She is looking blankly at me for a second, quietly, while I try not to transport myself back to fifth grade math class, not knowing how to say that I still don't understand, even though clearly this is supposed to be obvious. Luckily Ms. L isn't my fifth grade maths teacher and she kept at it for a while. We got into a smaller debate about what colors we saw in the photo, I saw grey and she saw purple. I saw orange where she saw red.
My face cooled off and we got back to painting, but I still don't feel confident that I got it. To the best of my understanding, she wants me to blend my colors, with as little paint as possible, without dry brushing the texture of the canvas. Either that or she doesn't want me adding detail yet, but I don't know how NOT to put detail onto the canvas much less accomplish shapes without any lines. So I focused my attention on blending. What felt like moments later, it was time to clean up and head home. Water Pitcher with Tomatoes to be continued...
"Creating art is 70% looking and only 30% painting."
Me thinks these pupils are only registering about 25%. :P
This is definitely a whole new way of painting for me. It isn't background, focal point, details and done in two hours. I am supposed to take something I see, turn it into blurry, lineless blobs of value before creating the objects I see. Yet I am still left asking, where is the wine?
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