Plein-Air Play Date

I work in words, but sometimes they are wearisome, and when two friends who are artists invited me to come and join them for some painting, I seized the opportunity. I knew it wouldn’t be easy, and I hoped it wouldn’t be humiliating, but my expectations were appropriately modest. I figured I would just watch and be present and play at it a bit. We went up to a bluff overlooking the beach and Cele set up a wooden easel for me and squirted a few splotches of oil paint onto a glossy white palette. Jeanne gave me brushes and a small tin of turpentine and offered me a stretched canvas that seemed dauntingly large. I chose to use a smaller one that I had bought years earlier and stored, still blank, in a desk drawer.

My father was an artist. He painted murals and boughs of heart-shaped leaves, peacocks, clowns, and exotic flowers, even on the ceiling. I loved the smell of his casein paints, oily sweet dollops from silver tubes in colors like burnt umber, crimson, and cerulean, names that even then were poetry to me, and the familiar odor of benzene, which I came to associate with Daddy being home. Like most kids, I spent many hours contentedly drawing pictures, and it never occurred to me that I didn’t know how. I mostly just enjoyed the process and did not critique the results. With the onset of adulthood, however, there came a steady estrangement from my right brain; even in my current efforts as a writer I tend to over-think each element in a constrained, self-conscious way rather than diving in with holistic, intuitive abandon.

And so the book Cele had suggested earlier as preliminary reading was a fitting resource. It’s called Art & Fear by David Bayles and Ted Orland, and I recommend it highly. “To require perfection is to invite paralysis,” the authors say, and boy, have I experienced that principle in action! (Or rather inaction.)

Another good bit of advice: The place to learn about your execution is in your execution. Your work is your guide. Perhaps it has all been said before, but I have seldom seen it so crisply expressed. It’s all about not being Mozart or Rembrandt or Shakespeare (or even Jackson Browne) and doing your art nonetheless, learning to work on your work, remembering that even the “failed” pieces are essential to creating the small portion that soars. Audience comes later. The only pure communication is between you and your work.

Hmmm. Exactly as it was when I was a little girl stretched out on the floor with my siblings, happily filling reams of loose-leaf with pencil drawings or pressing sheets of butcher paper onto the radiator and creating bold designs that would brighten and gloriously mutate as the crayon wax melted…but I digress.

I digress with the memory of pure creative joy, un-judged. Was it art? Who cares?

Back to the bluff, where I stand next to Cele and Jeanne, still pivoting around, trying to select my view, then deciding that I don’t even want to attempt a likeness of a real landscape.

“Plan it out on paper,” suggests Cele. “Then think in terms of masses, and forms.”

What I think is that maybe for this first sojourn, I’ll just experiment with these pretty colors; they don’t need to represent anything -- right? I’ll go with the “art should not mean, but be” rationale.

That blank canvas sure is intimidating, though.

Now Jeanne reveals the secret of the undercoat. No need to fret about that white canvas, because underneath it all I can apply a warm wash of burnt sienna. I like this concept. I look again at the world. Yes, underneath everything, there is a layer of color, and on top, a layer of light. I begin to notice anew the countless colors in the sea and sky, the hues of the hilltops, the staggering complexity and wonder of it. How in God’s name does anyone evoke this on canvas?

Jeanne: “It’s all technique. Practice. Understanding your materials. It takes time. What if I asked you to write a book in French? First you would have to learn French, right? Well, there you go. Start learning. Pick up the brush and see what it does.”

Good advice, too. Because I can easily imagine standing here for an hour simply pondering and feeling overwhelmed. I bravely pick up the brush and apply my undercoat.It’s more orange than brown, a rust tone, becoming more translucent as I add turpentine, whispering of white clouds when I wipe across a section with my finger, briefly resembling the dusk of an Italian summer, then vaguely hinting of a broken sky and mottled light, but never the moody celestial light that I see above the ocean, not even remotely like that light, it is a stretch to call it light at all. I have no control. I do not know this alphabet.

Cele offers us some hot tea from a thermos. It’s white tea, a citrus variety. We chat about how old we are, how old we feel, how others view us, how we see ourselves. We watch the dogs romping on the beach below. Jeanne gives me a hand-out from Michael Drury’s class entitled “Random Thoughts of a Dogmatic Nature Concerning Plein-air Painting.” Rule number one: get in trouble as quickly as possible. I take this to mean that I should stop standing around.

But first I steal a glance at their canvasses. I know I shouldn’t, but I can’t help myself. Jeanne’s is bold, dramatic, already filled with depth and shadow, and stunning in its resemblance to the scene she has chosen to paint. Cele’s is the same view, but softer, almost pastel-like, a rose warmth to its light, its basic forms already in place.

I retreat to my own little canvas, glowing with its undercoat, waiting. I use a big brush and a small one. I paint a thin white line of horizon, then a multi-hued and corrugated sea, perhaps a patchy sky. It doesn’t look like anything, but it’s fun. I wipe away parts I don’t like or paint right over them, and I struggle to mix gray, essential coinage for this day, but which it turns out is a complicated color that somehow contains even yellow, and I feel the vast, discouraging weight of all I do not know.

Then I watch the ever changing light, and I am grateful to be out here, just playing with my friends.