works of wanderlust

Month: June 2024

  • about all the little details.

    As Ferris Beuller wisely reminded us, life moves pretty fast. If you don’t stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it.

    I spend a lot of time rushing. And this shortcoming often applies to my painting, as well.

    Of course, one of the so-called rules of watercolour painting that I picked up on early on in my artistic efforts was that in watercolour timing is gosh darn nearly everything. Almost every technique and method somehow relates to the timing of the application of the paint mixture onto the surface during a window of time while there is a certain moisture level on the paper or a particular dryness of the last application or at a very specific moment of diffusion of pigments. Timing can change the final look of a piece dramatically. Vibrancy comes from precision.

    Another of course, because of course, I mistook timing for speed.

    That is to say, I have had this knot in my brain as I reach for my brush to put paint onto the page that precision timing was all about being fast and efficient. I got tangled up in the notion that one wet the page and then zip-zap-zooey one flung the paint around in a glorious way, without hesitation, to create the perfect piece of art. I foolishly thought it was about racing the evaporation of the water.

    And sometimes it is.

    But usually it is not.

    I have learned, slowly, that in fact is goes a lot more like this: some artists are not so much good because they are fast, some artists are fast because they are good.

    short backwards strokes

    Last fall I realized that there was a certain beauty to be found in boundless intracacy. In the details. I dug into the art of sketching backwards from where I usually started. Usually, I would draw the shape of the whole then work inwards to elaborate on the details. A building would materialize as a box on the horizon and then the doors, windows, eaves, ledges, bricks and more would fill in the inside as if I was colouring inside the lines. A tree would begin as a silhouette and then I would scribble in the leaves and the branches and the shadows and all the internal shapes to make it more tree-like.  But taking that backwards, a building might start as  a valance light fixture on a brick wall that extended outward to fill outwards. A tree might start as a collection of inner branch-like shapes with some details leaves and shadows and then maybe only imply that the tree went beyond that. I think our natural inclination is to show the whole, but the edges of objects are only artificial boundaries we impose on them and in telling their stories through art sometimes its the details that are the most interesting.

    I finished the last week of the latest watercolour course just the other night and the instructor mentioned offhand that sometimes he will work on a painting for months, for a couple hours each session a few times per week. He didn’t outright say it, but it pretty much told us that his best work is slow and methodical.

    My goal for this summer is, I think, to narrow in on the details and slow down.

    When I gifted away a bunch of my painting last chrishmus I got asked repeatedly: how long did it take you to paint this?

    I dunno. I’d reply. Like, an hour.

    The paintings were nice. Simply, but nice. A work of efficiency and speed and, yes, even a bit of proficiency in a small handful of watercolour technique that allowed me to work fast—maybe even forced me to work fast.

    But those paintings were only detailed in as much as the randomness of the techniques I used implied detail. There was beauty in randomness. But the detail did not come from precision or intention, rather it fell out of accident and organic chaos, and was good because I had lightly harnessed that randomness.

    Just like when I had to re-teach myself to draw outwards from detail, I think I need to rethink my painting hangups too. What does it mean to paint the details slowly: to start with the heart of what you want to paint and then wrk outwards, rather that trying to affect the whole of the subject to the page and then fill in the bits and pieces with speed and precision?

    I dunno. But it seems like it’s gonna take a lot longer than an hour.

  • of spring flowers

    It’s been nearly six months since I wrote a note here, and regretfully that means I have passed by many opportunties for noting the slow but methodically forward learning that has happened in the intervening span.

    For example, my spring has been consumed by the most stereotypical of watercolour subject: flowers.

    You know. Close your eyes. Picture a watercolour painting. Now say aloud what was in the image you just pictured. Ninety-three point four percent of you just said the word “flowers” —and you wouldn’t be wrong.

    Early on in my watercolour adventures I told people I was getting into this medium an many of the responses fell into the vibe check of “so—you like painting flowers, huh?”

    I resisted.

    I painted urban sketches. I dabbled in nature scenes. I painted bugs, animals, portraits, snowy landscapes, and autumn foliage. I avoided flowers—mostly.

    Then, my favourite local watercolour instructor, a guy who teaches community art classes in my neighbourhood, offered his spring course selection and it was—yup. Flowers.

    layers of light and colour

    there is a good reason flowers are a watercolour favourite. The medium lends itself well to two particular characteristics of colourful blossoms: light and colour. beautiful flowers are semi-transparent whisps of colour and gradient. beautiful flowers are collections of organic curves evoking hues evolved over eons to evoke our senses. And well-tuned watercolour is the same, watery gradients of semi-transparent colours, layers of hues evoking shape and texture and even accidentally a watercolour abstract is likely to imply something floral. it is almost as though the very medium was invented to solve the human urge to depict flowers as art.

    I relented. I signed up.

    Sure. I meant that me, a middle-aged cis white man who spends his days training for running races and writing science fiction would be spending an entire evening each week in a room full of the type of women who signed up for a flower-painting course at the local community centre. (They’re all creative and lovely, by the way—I’m just the odd duck in the room because all their husbands are at home doing more so-called manly things like changing their oil and drinking beer while they watch the hockey game in their garage.)

    And yet it turns out that painting flowers is probably what I needed to do—at least as a progressive step on my watercolour learning adventures.

    Watercolour flower painting is rife with technique and form in the medium. The delicacy of the subject, the application of hue and tonal value, texture and shadow, transparency and implications of our primal understanding of these shapes, all of it is of vital importance to paint a flower that isn’t growing somewhere in the uncanny valley.

    All of it is vital to becoming a better watercolourist.

    It may be stereotypical, but that is not without ryhme or reason. It is stereotypical because it is like asking if a baker knows the recipe for cake, or if a photographer can shoot weddings, or if a barrista can pull an espresso. Watercolours are turning the world into flowers. Everything is flowers.

    It’s probably not unrelated that this morning I bought myself a summer pass to the local botanic gardens, and need to go pack my travelling art kit.