Starts

 

The New Year seems like a good time to write about STARTS.  Specifically, those first steps that constitute a start on a painting.  Approaching a blank canvas can be intimidating--even terrifying!  Making those very first marks is an important moment. Sometimes I even begin by painting over an old painting, so I have something to "work against", as you see directly below.

What happens at the start? It is pure magic! You are laying in shapes and forming the composition. You can see the picture coming to life on a blank slate. It happens very quickly, with every stroke serving as as an overture to the next. The future of the painting is nothing but possibilities--nothing has gone wrong yet! These are moments of high excitement, no question.

I experiment with different methods of starting.  Sometimes I use a fine brush to draw with lines.  Other times I tone the entire canvas with a thin dark paint (thinned with mineral spirits), and then rub it off to create an underpainting. I also experiment with toning the canvas different hues, as you can see from these photos.

In any approach, a good start makes makes me excited about the future of the painting. On the other hand, a bad start is very hard to overcome, and in my case usually means that the entire painting will be a big struggle, probably not ending well. If you make a bad start, you fare better to simply wipe it off, and make a whole new start. Thank goodness that the oil painting process makes that entirely possible! 

I'm illustrating this post with examples of some "starts".  A few of the finished paintings are already up on my website, for the curious: https://www.lesleypowellart.com

The Learning Curve

Every serious painter knows this hard truth:  there are many stumbles on the path to improvement, and you must be willing to fall, and then pick yourself back up and start over. Progress can be sporadic (and that's an understatement). Many hours must be put in. Courage and perseverance are key.

I reflected on this truth while reading an article that discussed how babies learn to walk. Toddlers learning to walk are so determined that they travel the length of about eight football fields in ONE HOUR. During that hour, they fall an average of 30 times. It takes 2.6 million steps for them to become proficient at walking. As the article notes, this failure rate would be deeply discouraging (the article even said "catastrophic") for an adult trying to learn a new skill. 

Toddlers persevere in learning to walk because faster, hands-free mobility is thrilling.  Adults persevere in our endeavors because mastery of a new skill is nirvana. 

Toddlers also teach us that learning is not linear.  They often start to walk, and then revert to crawling for a while. Their progress is U-shaped.  In other words, when learning a new skill, we often get worse before we get better.

Another important lesson from the article is that infants learn best "when operating near the limits of their current skill level."  The takeaway for the rest of us is clear:  Always be "at the edge of what you can't currently do."  

"After Degas"

12 x 10, Oil on Linen

(c) Lesley Powell 2020

I've written about the creative process before, and the example of toddlers learning to walk reinforces some of the notions I explored then. It's a nice concrete example to keep in mind as we start the New Year.  Yes, it's frustrating to be at the edge of what you can't currently do--but oh, the rewards are great when you can push that boundary a little bit further!