Whether you are painting a room in your house or a picture, painting can be a huge pain in the ass. The prep-work, finding the crappiest clothes you can, the actual painting, the smell, the clean up you know what I’m talkin’ bout. And that doesn’t even include choosing a color scheme!
Thankfully we haven’t had to paint our house since we moved in, our doublewide sweet doublewide came with plaster board with a design already on it.
Since the weather was so nice today and we had all the windows open, I decided to paint an oil painting titled ‘For Ma’. (She won’t get it for a year or so as it can take that long to completely dry).
If you’ve ever painted with oil you know what a pain it is. Clean up is a bitch as you have to use turpentine and it’s hard to clean up without the whole house, and you, smelling to high heaven. You also know that if you don’t clean up right after, you have something that goes beyond a mess. “Funny” but the brushes won’t work when the bristles are ‘glued’ together.
While you are in the process of painting, ya get dirty. It’s impossible to get around that one, at least for me it is.
During the winter I’ve been painting with tempera, acrylics and watercolors, all are easy clean up and none leave the house smelling like a paint store. Still, you have to prep your area and clean up afterwards.
I’ve been doing abstracts for the last two years, I hadn’t painted anything for quite a long time and never anything abstract before. I did this because I knew my painting skills were in dire need of practice and thought this would be the best way to go. Turns out that I really enjoy doing them, two people look at the same painting and see the exact same thing.
I never have a ‘picture’ of what I want to paint, I just let the brush strokes take over. Plus, if I don’t like it it’s easy enough to change it until it’s something that I like (or at least can deal with).
One day, when my paintings sell for millions, they will be known as ‘black, white and a thousand shades in between’. As you may have guessed by that, I only use white and one other color (and no, not all of them are black and white).
Not because I don’t like colorful paintings, I do as a matter of fact, but for me I love the thousand shades in between.
Rarely I’ll have a theme of something, Angels Among Us was to be a painting about my depression. Yep, the two colors are blue and white. But I still didn’t have anything specific in mind just that I wanted to paint about how I felt. Out of that painting, which happened to be my first one in an extremely long time, I see an angel in white surrounded by a ton of shades of blue, representing my mood. Yet there is an angel there which gives me hope.
Now you may look at it and think, oh I don’t know, my five year old could do better than this. And that’s cool, hell, sometimes I act like a five year old and maybe yours could do better, who knows. But I like it no, I really like it. And this is quite a miracle because I am my harshest critic, worse than you could ever imagine, just ask Joe.
When I’m painting does it always look good? No! Not by a long shot! I step back, take a break and maybe grab a different brush and keep at it until I see something that just jumps out at me saying ‘here I am’.
After I finished today’s painting, then came the dreaded clean up. Oh joy! Too bad turpentine isn’t an aphrodisiac. It just plain stunk up the house, just like life stinks sometimes.
Yep, I know a completely different type of stink but still stinks none the less. There are up times, there are down times and those somewhere in the middle. Like it or not, sometimes they get worse before they get better. The whole darkness before the dawn, faith type of thing.
I guess the ‘prep work’ in my life is praying. The painting, just like letting the brush go where it wants to, is letting God handle things. The dreaded clean up is sometimes what we have to do after we screwed up, the worse kinda clean up.
The nice thing about the “clean up”, and probably the only nice thing about it, is having our slate wiped clean. Lets face it, sometimes it really sucks but if we ask for forgiveness - poof, we are forgiven.
This doesn’t mean we can do the same stupid thing over and over and over and over (get the picture) knowing that we’ll be forgiven. Actually you could do it but it’s kinda defeating the purpose of your walk with God.
We screw up, put just like a painting, we can take another brush and change the picture to look like something we’ll be happy with.
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