Showing Up with Paint

Peonies in a French Vase, © 2011, oil on canvas, 12" x 12"

"Are you willing to show up with your paint and just 'be' with whatever happens?" a coach once asked me years ago when I was feeling in something of a slump with my painting. I had internalized someone else's negative opinions about my paintings, handing over all authority (and responsibility) for my art-making in the process. I very nearly stopped trying to paint at all, but a deeper, braver, art-ward part of me wouldn't let me.

Mostly I had gotten stuck because I was afraid. Afraid of what? you might logically wonder. Some sort of blob of largely unchallenged fear.

Afraid of doing "bad" work (determined by whom?), afraid of not really trusting myself and painting in a straightjacket, afraid of not liking my own work, afraid of succeeding and failing, both--perhaps even at the same time!

But I at least knew I was willing to show up with my paint (and brushes, etc.) and just "be" with whatever happened. And I found that the more I did that, the less I worried, and the more I wanted to keep painting.

Writers and writing coaches often speak of the virtue of "just showing up"--of making a practice of showing up at your desk (or wherever you prefer to write) every day and writing something. Not waiting to be inspired. Not waiting until the stars seemed perfectly aligned and every other issue has been resolved.

And the same seems to hold true for painting as well (and, I imagine, for just about every kind of creative endeavor). 

These days I've been showing up with my paint several times a week, and it's amazing how many more paintings I have to show for it! (Of course it helps that many of them are smaller canvases, too.)

The image above is one of them. 

The Yellow Wall

"The Yellow Wall", c 2010, Sukie Curtis, acrylic on sheetrock

A few days ago I started to beautify a really gross, never-been-painted sheetrock wall inside our garage, one that we and visitors to our house pass by numerous times a day going in and out our back door. From the start I decided that I wasn't going to worry about the "rules" of proper wall-painting (things like taping and "mudding" over the sheetrock seams, for example). Since it was just a wall in our garage, and since it was seriously grubby, stained, gross, and ugly, I felt totally exempt from having to do things really well, because no matter what I did, it was going to look better than it had.  A perfect project--no fail!

I did scrub the wall, twice even, and primed it--even that was a huge step in the direction of attractiveness. I added bits of sample yellow paints to the primer to tint the wall so that I might need fewer coats of paint. And it worked.

So first there was a somewhat mottled yellow wall of various hues. Then I decided on which of the yellows I liked the best for the primary color and got a pint sample made. It was way more than enough to cover the wall, so now I'm looking around for something else that wants to be yellow!.

When I first dipped the roller in the pan of yellow paint (Benjamin Moore's "Amarillo") and started to roll it on, I felt a surge of elation! It was so much fun spreading that deliciously happy color on the gross garage wall. I found myself imagining being a therapist recommending yellow paint as a cure for melancholia, and a shrink taking out her script pad and actually writing out Benjamin Moore "Amarillo" ("Sunshine" would work well too, and "Yellow Rain Coat," and ...), perhaps even with the pigment codes. Finding a grubby old wall might have to be part of the prescribed therapy, too.

The second day I painted on some large and small rectangles of other colors, adapting a design I had seen in a book but not really feeling excited about what it looked like. Plus I didn't really know why I was copying someone else's design rather than trusting myself to come up with one that I liked. So day two ended with me feeling not so excited and elated about my yellow wall project, and day three I didn't try to do any more to it. I suppose it was something of a furlough day. I did think off and on about painting over the rectangles from the day before--reverting to solid yellow.

Yesterday, being the Fourth of July, I opted out of some of our neighborhood's traditional Independence Day activities and chose instead to stay home and paint. I wasn't sure if I was going to paint the yellow wall or a smaller painting on canvas. But when I found myself alone in the house, the wall beckoned. The wall and a small flower arrangement that David and I had bought at the Farmers Market on Saturday.

With a combination of impish delight and a noticeable confidence in my drawing abilities (as if all the sketch book drawing I've done has led me to feel pretty "sure-footed" with a drawing implement--at least when I'm in the right frame of mind), I took out one of the new Sharpies I bought recently.

"I can draw on the wall with a Sharpie, a permanent marker!" I noted to myself. (And I could have added, "And there's no one to tell me not to!"

I don't remember if I ever drew on a wall when I was little. I think I did some unauthorized scribbling in books, but walls? I doubt it. To take out a permanent marker with the clear intention of drawing on a wall gave me another burst of delightful energy! Like a second childhood, or the childhood I never dared to have!

I held the vase of flowers in my left hand and drew quickly with my right hand--not every single stem and leaf and bloom in the arrangement, but enough to give the sense of a bunch of flowers. Sometimes the lines were mere squiggles, not really flower-shaped at all, but I could feel the flowers, leaves, and stems none the less.

When I'd finished drawing, I took a short break, then returned with colors of paint and some smaller brushes to jazz things up a bit more. I stopped when I felt I was finished (and I might do one or two small things, but for the most part, I do think I was finished yesterday). So I took up the blue Sharpie again and signed my name (deliberately largely) and dated the wall, July 4, 2010.

I had such fun, I think I'm ready to do another wall.

A Little More about Painting Flowers

A couple of months ago while visiting a recent exhibit at the Portland Museum of Art, I was swept off my feet before I even got to the third painting among the dozens of still life paintings, drawings, and collages that made up the exhibit. But it wasn't even a work of art that stunned me; it was the written text that accompanied a 16th century Flemish (I think) painting. I know I took out pen and paper and wrote the quote down, but I've not been able to find where I wrote it, so this is from memory.

The text said that the painter of the particular, very detailed still life had been a monk in a Flemish monastery. (I just had to look up Flemish--I was feeling unsure whether it was another word for Belgian or for Dutch--in fact it refers to the people, language, etc. of Flanders. It is in fact the Dutch language spoken in Belgium, one of Belgium's two official languages. The other language I believe is French, because my college boyfriend and I were once given a ride in the Loire valley by a Belgian couple in their tiny Citroen. We managed to converse via my French, but they spoke Flemish to one another, while Jeff and I of course spoke English. I am certain that their knowledge of English was far better than our knowledge of Flemish.)

But I do digress, rather far. Back to the text with the painting at the museum.

It said something about how the close observation and rendering of flowers was seen to be an aid to the contemplation of God. Well, that got my attention! Not that I haven't felt or experienced that myself, but to read that some male religious authority, even a whole religious order or institution believed and declared that four centuries ago, and even supported it (read on)--that felt different to me! 

I wonder if I was staring at part of the divide between Catholic and Protestant spiritualities, or the chasm between the pre-Enlightenment and post-Enlightenment relationship between science and religion, particularly Christianity (as well as Islam and Judaism). Science, one expression of the close observation of nature, was for centuries seen as a companion of religion, and all pathways of deeper knowledge about the world we live in--botany, astronomy, medicine, even mathematics!--were honored as ways of knowing the ultimately Unknowable. Art also has a stronger, more honored place in Christianity before the Reformation, with some forms of Protestantism so suspicious of imagery, music, and the like. (Think Chartres Cathedral vs. a plain white-walled Congregational meeting house.)

Without going too far down this path this morning, I will only say that human love and contemplation of the created world has not always enjoyed a central place in Christian theology, liturgy or practice, particularly in its American expressions. In my experience, love and contemplation of the created world have usually gotten a kind of a sideways nod--"Well, yes, dear, that's all very nice, but...what does it have to do with Jesus? what does it have to do with the cross and salvation? What does it have to do with this week's Scripture lessons?" (We might ask, what does it have to do with the oil still gushing into the Gulf of Mexico and begin to get somewhere.)

When I still had a practice of going on silent retreats, the best part for me usually had to do with being outside, talking to trees and sometimes even "dancing" with them, drawing ferns and wildflowers, wandering in woods and meadows, conversing with birds. But somehow that's now what I thought I was supposed to be doing. I was supposed to be having three sustained "prayer periods" a day, or meditating on some passage of Scripture and letting it illuminate some heavy issue in my life. 

"Have you asked Jesus about that?" a retreat director might say. And I would shrink inside, crumple with a little more guilt and shame. "No," would have been the honest answer. "Why would I?" No wonder I stopped going on "directed retreats" and started "directing" myself--hanging out in the silence and the natural world, sometimes with art supplies. But always with a nagging sense that I was supposed to be doing my retreats some other way. Not trusting myself. And certainly not trusting delight.

To be fair and balanced, I did once long ago, when still a very new priest, tell my bishop that I had talked to and danced with some spruce trees while on a retreat. And he confessed his own "closet pantheism" in reply. I remember leaving that official meeting with effervescent joy and buying an ice cream cone on the way home to celebrate.

But I do digress again.

I didn't think about all of that while standing in the museum. I only registered viscerally that that little piece of text and what followed were chipping away at something in me, maybe even blasting holes in some armor of mine, or at some sort of wall.

The text continued by saying that the painter of the painting had been "employed by the monastery as a painter of flowers." 

"No way!" I thought.  "What a deal! Sign me up! I want to be employed as an observer and painter of flowers!" 

A whole cascade of similar sentiments tumbled through my mind and body. I felt breathless, dumbfounded. I had "glimpsed myself" in a piece of text on a museum wall--a bit of print I can imagine lots of viewers passed right over. 

I have been a close observer and a delighter in the close observation of flowers, fruits and vegetables, plants in general, for a long long time. In that sense it has been an "occupation" of mine. But it has not been a primary source of income for me, has not been my paid employment. A primary, though perhaps largely unacknowledged, source of sustenance and of great joy, yes; a natural way of getting out of my head and into a more focused, present attention; and an avenue for being "a bride married to amazement" to use Mary Oliver's lovely phrase.

To imagine that such an occupation was once upon a time truly honored as a way of contemplating God and was supported with financial reward (meaning, I assume, that the selling of the monk's paintings was a source of income for the monastery that fed, housed, and clothed him)--well, that just set me humming. 

And the humming continues.