On Saturday my art group had a guest teacher on Zoom. Artist and teacher, Briana Goetzen, led us in making liquid watercolor mandalas. I had a lot of fun simply playing with my watercolor paints (not liquid watercolors) and was surprised at how relaxing it was to play with the mandala form. I loved how Briana suggested that we recognize our inner critic during the mandala painting play, thank it for it’s help, but ask it to take a back seat while we painted.
Color Me Happy
It was a welcome change after my efforts at making landscape color studies. And taking that break helped me to get clearer about how and why I want to paint. I am not interested in depicting how things look (the camera does that very well, thank you). Instead I enjoy painting how things feel to me. It’s a totally different intention and experience to focus on the heart instead of the head while making art.
I still got detoured working on my landscape painting class “homework,” trying and failing, to accurately depict a sunset I had photographed earlier this summer. The whole experiment left me feeling cranky and failed.
Trying to realistically depict sunset did not make me happy
But when I reworked the painting, playing with how it made me feel I had a totally different experience.
Painting this was a joyful experience
Color me joyful
Yesterday I watched a small tutorial by watercolor painter, Jean Haines. She suggested putting a several dollops of watercolor tube paint in a row across the top of a sheet of watercolor paper. Then she demonstrated using a clean wet brush to pull the paint down the page just to see an intense layer of the color and to see how the paint moved and spread on the paper. Occasionally she dropped one color onto another color just to see how they mixed.
What fun!
Not only was the exercise fun, but it gave me a whole different appreciation for my tube watercolor paints. Why not be profligate and use the paint right from the tube? It’s a different experience with less control of the paint. But that is one of the things I love about watercolor painting—the unexpected and unplanned “accidents.”
This little “experiment” also helped me realize that even though good watercolor paper is expensive. It’s worth it to me to use the good stuff all the time. I like the heft of a good watercolor paper, and the way the water and paint dance and interact together.
Is it a good time for you to thank your inner critic and ask her/him to take a back seat in your art for awhile? And if you can afford it, maybe you can be profligate with your art supplies too.
May you walk in beauty.
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