Paint the Light

I get sequestered fairly often, don’t I?

It isn’t a matter of having nothing to say, nor is it a matter of not having the time to say it. It’s more a peculiar sort of isolation that comes from not having the words for what one is experiencing. It was Ra this time, and I am coming to understand now just how great a role His essence plays in the life I lead...

Since I found that I never ate there, I turned my dining room into a studio. It is the perfect space for that, really: lots of natural light and an airy feeling, also a good view of the river in the distance through a west facing window. In the winter, the glow of snow covered hills and the plucked white of snow clouds above a grey wash. In the summer, the ocean blue of storms darkening the horizon. At any time of year, I can be found there most afternoons. Bathed in the warm glow of sunset, I sit in my ergonomic chair which is made less ergonomic for me being hunched over one project or another. I have to be close to my work because I work in details. Tiny glass beads, origami, mini polymer sculptures, or intricate drawings. I am consumed by a world of small things.

And I am obsessed with light.

 The beads are chosen for their shine and paired with crystals in bright hues that glow from within.

 The origami is done in beetle paper with its shimmery shifting tones.

 The polymer is glazed with mica powders.

 Even the pen and marker drawings are accented with white ink to give the impression of light.

And it is all beautiful, but...

I had painted once, years before—an old set of oil brushes and new box of acrylics. But there wasn’t enough light in it to hold my interest for very long. I dabbled on and off with the paints until college when I had the misfortune of taking an art class, thinking that it might be fun to expand upon my hobby. It turned out to be anything but. I had signed up for a course called “Color and Composition Basics for Non-Art Majors”. It turned out to be a “black & white only” modern art course. I got a D on my very first assignment for the class because I was unable to compose something with only straight lines that looked half-way decent in the space of a single class period.

To be fair to myself, in retrospect I realize that had I been given some direction, I might have managed it. But the “professor” was a self-important Grad student who gave that graded assignment, without any actual instruction beforehand mind you, on the first day of the course to “thin out” the class and get rid of those of us who had signed up mainly for fun. He openly and bluntly criticized our work and skills in front of the more “talented” students and all but said we should drop the class if we didn’t want to ruin our GPAs. And while I understand now that he was just an ass and that the grade he gave me and the comments he made were not really a reflection on my actual abilities as an artist, at the time I understood something different: that I wasn’t good enough for classical art. I put the paints away and eventually, when they had gathered enough dust, I gave them away.

Years passed.

I honed my skills as a bead-weaver and dabbled in myriad other arts that were worlds away from the canvas and sketchbook. “I have no eye for perspective,” I said when asked, “and I’m too clumsy with a brush.” Words subconsciously echoing through time from that day in my first year of college when I had been told I would never be a serious artist. Then, recently, I stumbled upon the self proclaimed “non-art” of zentangle. After the fact, I note that it is ironically similar to what that Grad student art teacher had wanted us to produce (only he would have wanted us to eliminate any curves and “pretty” elements—as we all know “true art is moving, not pretty”…he really was rather pretentious wasn’t he?) I got into it in a big way, devoting every spare second to zentangling. 

But I couldn’t follow the rules of zentangle.  I loathed the restrictiveness of the “strings” and couldn’t stomach random patterns that didn’t look like something when I was finished. I took the more organic elements and played with them in more naturalistic themes.

Then I dropped the zentangle structure all together and just went wild with the patterns themselves. Then I reached out for more realistic forms to combine with the patterns. Before I knew it, I was sketching birds and butterflies and fish and other real things everywhere.

It was a spring board back into the world of art.

Soon, I wasn’t satisfied with the small selection of brush pens I had left from my high school days. I ordered a variegated color set in green and played with it a bit before noticing they were labeled as “watercolor brush pens”. Watercolors, I thought, those are usually fairly inexpensive and not as messy as acrylics or oils. So I bought a small student-grade field palette of standard watercolor cakes and a few packs of brushes. Hesitant to invest too heavily, I stuck with a few packs of artist trading cards in watercolor paper.

My first attempt still shows the zentangle roots of exploration. The paints behaved oddly and the paper warped. I discovered the technique of lifting (where paint is removed from the paper after the fact) quite by accident at an inopportune moment. It still came out fairly good, so I wasn’t discouraged, but I did realize I needed more knowledge to make good use of my supplies. I bought a book on my kindle and read up.

The second attempt was better. I properly stretched the paper first this time and practiced doing a wash for the background. I also only lightly sketched my drawing instead of inking the lines in pen and let the paint be the boundaries. But I was only half-way through the book—further in, I discovered other techniques: proper methods of lifting paint to create highlights, working in negative space, and glazing with multiple layers of color. The result of all that learning took me completely by surprise:

Notice anything? It may not show very well on camera, but in real life it's striking. Light. There was light in my painting. Even in poor lighting the highlights seemed to glow. And with that, a sudden realization dawns.

This. This is what He meant.

And  I do not yet have the words for what I mean by that, so it will wait for another day. For now I am left with Ra’s presence hanging in the space around and within me, echoing in that radiance that overwhelms me whenever my creation takes hold of my inner self.

  Paint the light. 

And I do. 

Dua Ra!