Last night the wind howled and kept us awake off and on as it shook our old house. It bucketed rain all weekend but almost everyone showed up for art class on Saturday and we painted in gouache again. There were ten of us and we arrived with wet feet and damp jackets. I arrived with stringy hair. Some had to battle traffic and slippery roads. I had to battle fatigue. I’d been up too late the night before and was a little out of sorts. We sat down around four long tables pushed together and painted again with gouache while the rain pelted the big windows.

A lot of the class had not painted in gouache before and like me they love it. It has a dense velvety quality, good for very flat work and more nuanced work too depending on how much water you add to it. I shared techniques. They looked at their pictures and wondered where they ought to go with them.  That really is a question of trying things out, of not being attached to what you have, of being willing to muck it up. I mucked mine up. This is just a small portion of it here. But it doesn’t matter. I can always do another one and build on what I’ve learned if I feel inspired to. They can too. That’s a big lesson right there. If we take a cautious route we’ll never get very far. Big mistakes make you jump higher.
It took all morning but towards the end it looked like we forgot both the rain and ourselves. We forgot whatever it was we came in with or I did anyway. By the end of class the focus on the art meant there was just the art and being there with it. Some of the work done at the very end, loosely like scribbles, was the most interesting and assured.

One of the class members said this is art yoga and it is. We dropped into the present moment and had fun. We let everything else go. Very cool in my book—especially on a miserable day.

Next week will be sunny and we’ll shake things up a bit!

March 9th, 2008 | Category: Drawing Club | Subscribe to comments | Leave a comment | Trackback URL