Day 5 5-min. Writing Challenge Painting

Painting. A Painting. The act of painting. Painting what? A painting of what?

It used to be that my admiration for art was so great that the idea of painting, the act of doing, felt far beyond me. In many ways it still does. It does when I look at the artwork that attracts my attention. The great Dutch Masters, Leonardo DaVinci. My own preferences range widely, and over a lifetime, my tastes have changed. What I rejected as a young woman, I now find value in, much like I do with certain pieces of literature. As I grow, the works grow on me. My appreciation sees below something I didn't notice or understand earlier.

Still, to make even the smallest attempt to paint, to do the act, has been beyond me. That is until I had a grandchild. It was my great pleasure and responsibility to be with her almost daily from the time she was about a month old until she entered pre-school at 4 1/2. That made me the one who got to have all the fun...including playing around with paint. I learned at that time, that my attitude would have an impact on her, and so wanting that impact to be positive, encouraging, and devoid of my own psychological hang ups, I listened to how I talke to her about paints and painting. I painted with her, and listened to myself as I began mentally berating myself about how I was painting. I stopped myself from expressing those cruel thoughts, and instead changed my thinking. I looked for what it was I loved about the experience.

What I found was pleasure. Pure pleasure in getting paint all over myself as I used my brush to swipe the thick, viscous paint across the surface of the paper. Swirling the brush on the surface, and turning the brush handle in my hand, to use the very tip of the brush to plot raindrops on the garden path I sloshed about on with my wide edge of the brush. Using colors and mixing blues and yellows to get greens. Reds and whites to find pinks. Blues and pinks to find lavenders, and mixing it all together to make a messy soddy brown. Remembering what I'd learned as a child about the spectrum of colors. Recalling too what I'd learned about taking care of my tools, staying in the lines, and later, of breaking all the rules to find new paths.

Now painting is a pure pleasure, I combine with other parts of most days. Daringly, I have taken a class or two, and have allowed painting to enter my vernacular--as part of my vocabulary of life.

While the artists I love, whose work I most admire, include new artists who live near me like Jill McVarish, Robert Paulmenn, Noel Thomas, Erin Gafill, Cindy Kerwin-Cori, and Shirley Novack--their talent, gifts, and crafts though not mine, do not prohibit me, any longer, to avoid touching paint to canvas, brush to pad, or imagination to the paints on my canvas.