Embracing Growth in Art: My Journey as a Beginning Painter

I had my first class swimming with the big fish of the area watercolorists here in Roanoke yesterday.

Am I ready to take this class?

Probably not.

I saw some work in there that I won’t be able to do for…possibly years.

Or ever.

But I figure if I’m able to absorb just a little of what I experienced in class as I continue to paint, then it’s worth being a small fish in a big pond.

I know, from my experience making jewelry, that the only way to execute what is in my mind and marry that with my actual ability is time.

How many earrings have I made over the last 20 or so years? I estimate around 2500 pairs.

I have to adopt the same mindset with my painting. For every painting I finish, I’m that much closer to being able to do the paintings I WANT to do.

The subjects that I am drawn to so far are landscapes and animals.

I painted this crow a few days ago and added the quote from Henry David Thoreau about how crows are the soul of our landscapes. I also added a little Picmonkey texture at the bottom of the painting so let’s just call this a mixed media piece.

While I was in class yesterday, I was able to peruse a classmate’s sketch book. It was beautiful. Every page a work of art. I bought a sketch book and have been using it, but it’s not beautiful yet. It’s my fits and starts, frustration about my inability to execute what I see in my heart and my attempts to capture my surroundings. It’s not something that anyone would ooh and ahh over, but that’s ok.

It’s a record of me trying, learning and experimenting.

A few years ago, I was in the Valley of the God’s out west, and took a photo of a butte. In the photo below, the sky is wrong on teh left and I wasn’t sure how to paint the foreground.

Photo on the right is painting the same subject but taking what didn’t work in the first attempt and going a different route. I feel like I made some good progress there.

I brought the butte closer and spent more time trying to get those shadows and hard lines to look like rocks. My sky looks better and I was able to show dirt and sand using shadows and brush strokes that gives it a more ‘landscape’ feel.

Painting my crow enabled me to find that quote about how they are the soul of a landscape. In my own backyard, I’ve been feeding and tending to my neighborhood crows now for 10 years. They know me and I know them.

They patrol my neighborhood and fight over territory from other crows and ravens, and they alerted me to a coyote that was about 30 yards from my hammock down by the creek one Fall afternoon that I will forever grateful for.

Painting is allowing me to access a part of myself that metalwork doesn’t.

I feel at peace losing time to the pigments and my imagination, musing about what it all means…if anything.

In unrelated news to this post, I am moving out of my gorgeous studio and heading back to my basement this month. I’ve had a glorious year in my beautiful studio, made some great friends with the potters, but life has some other plans for me right now that requires some changes.

More on that in the next post.

Random fact about me: I sleep with a sleep mask and it has made all the difference in the world for me getting a solid 7-8 hours of deep sleep at night.