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Making Art: The Paris Dream and the Reality
Before I began taking art classes, I had a very specific idea of what making art looked like.
Paris, of course.
A painter dressed in black, beret jauntily angled, easel positioned beside the Seine with a perfectly sized canvas in place. Sunlight would be glistening on the river. Everything would be peaceful and picturesque.
The artist would open a well-worn wooden box filled with paints and brushes, all perfectly arranged. There would be a proper palette. Proper brushes. Probably even proper clothes.
With everything set just right, the artist would begin dabbing paint onto the canvas.
A little green here. Some blue. A flourish of red or purple there.
And then, somehow, the painting would simply come together.
Voilà. A masterpiece.
No stress. No mess. Just like a Bounty commercial.
No painting something, deciding it is wrong, painting over it, changing your mind, painting it again and then wondering whether you should have left it alone three versions ago.
That was what I thought making art looked like.
I was wrong.
My actual life as an artist has turned out a little less Midnight in Paris and a little more Midnight in Paint-Stained Sweatshirts.
Instead of a proper palette, I use a disposable plate.
My paints travel in a beat-up suitcase on wheels that I found at Goodwill. It isn't the beautiful wooden paint box I once imagined, but it has wheels, which at this point seems considerably more useful.
My brushes are stored bristle-side up, of course, in an old plastic OU cup purchased at a football game so long ago that I couldn't begin to tell you when.
My wardrobe isn't particularly Parisian by any stretch of the imagination.
Old OCU law school sweatshirts have leapt from higher education to paint rags. Apparently, this is what happens to a law degree if you give it enough time.
Add old jeans and, dare I confess, socks with sandals. My mother would be so proud.
And I am ready to make art.
It is a look. Just not the one I had envisioned.
The actual painting process isn't particularly Parisian either.
Sometimes I sketch an idea. Then I sketch it again. Then I sketch it one more time, apparently believing the next attempt will reveal something the others were keeping from me.
Eventually, I get annoyed and start painting.
Oddly enough, that often works better. Something about putting the idea on canvas and adding color gives it a life that I can't always get on paper.
Other times, I skip the sketch completely. I can see the painting in my head, so I just start painting.
This does not always go well.
Sometimes there is repainting. Then maybe painting over the repainting. There may be moments when I stare at the canvas and question some of the decisions that brought us to this point.
Sometimes a painting gets shoved into a closet for months—or years—while I try to forget about it or try to decide what on earth to do with it.
Sometimes it comes back out. Sometimes it doesn't. Still other times, it gets a good coat of thick white paint over the entire canvas.
After years of taking art classes, I've learned that this is apparently my process.
I know a brilliant artist who paints the same subject multiple times before deciding on the final version. Her work is stunning.
I do not have this kind of patience. I barely have the patience to paint my own idea once.
I tend to start with an idea, put it on canvas and then argue with it until one of us gives in.
Sometimes the painting wins. Sometimes I do. Sometimes it goes into the closet until we're both prepared to discuss the matter again.
Somewhere along the way, I stopped worrying about whether this was the way an artist was supposed to work. It is the way I work. There is nowhere else I'd rather be.
A couple of years ago, I finally made it to Paris. And, of course, I walked along the Seine.
It was beautiful. Picturesque. Classic Paris. This was the very place where, years earlier, I had imagined all those artists in black, painting peacefully beside the river.
So I looked around. No easels. No neatly arranged wooden boxes of paint. And not a single beret-wearing artist dabbing paint onto a canvas.
Not one. Apparently, Paris hadn't gotten the memo either.
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