Wow, I’ve just finished my second painting class and I’m amazed at what the heck I’m actually painting! I haven’t picked up a brush seriously in decades and have pined to do this for many years.

Finally, I am inspired enough to do it in Mexico because I found the right teacher for me: Nina.

I won’t go in too much detail about her though, for privacy reasons, but I do want to share with you my experience so far.

After an hour or so on my first day two weeks ago, of talking and getting to know her and for her to know a bit about me, she left the room and came back with a half sheet of heavy painting paper and some little decorated rocks plus a box of various pieces of oil pastels.

She spread out the paper on a high table and told me to hold the little rocks and then forcibly throw them on to the paper, where they would stay as I drew around them connecting them with oil pastel colors of my choice. If a rock landed on an edge, that would be where my pastel mark would leave the page. So I circled and linked up all the stones and then we took them off. Voila! The skeleton of my painting. Nina told me Picasso used to do this.

Nina is an educator and established fine artist and she gives many workshops on intuitive creativity, and this is where I am headed with all this.

She pinned up my drawing on the wall and told me to pick some acrylic colors which she blobbed on to an enamel meat-market dish and told me to ‘activate’ my brush in water and start to play with the paint adding water and mixing here and there. It was, for me, a very delicate operation as I was like a fawn dipping my feet in a pond I’d never seen before: it felt that strange to me after so long.

Then she instructed me to add colour wash to my painting which I gradually did for the next hour. When time was up, she left my work hanging on her wall, we said our goodbyes and I arranged to come back in two weeks.

It was amazing! I felt my heart opening again to my wonderful creative sensitivities and I’m pretty sure I was beaming when I got home. (This after 6 weeks of on-and-off silly health issues that just kept cropping up and really depressing me.)

Yesterday was my second painting day, and so we talked a little had a cup of coffee and proceeded to play again with adding some darker lines in oil pastel. Amazingly, Nina told me to ‘make some notes’ about my painting. Notes? What do you mean notes?

Just like writing, working, making music, she told me, you make notes as you work on your painting and include little thumbnail sketches as well to work out aspects of the drawing including negative spaces, shapes and details ‘before’ I work them in to my painting. Also, she told me, to stand back from it and look at it. Then she took a sheet of paper, pinned it to the wall (about half the size of mine) and started to rough-sketch out the emerging lines and areas in very quick, rough connected line so that I could see my layout in simple form and to help me to decide what to do with the thing. The painting was telling me / telling me what to do!

Then she told me to start blocking out with household, water-based white paint the areas that I didn’t like and wanted to do something else with, which I did.

And finally, Nina told me to start adding back some color and to decide what actually was going on in the painting by standing back and looking at it.

Aha! I exclaimed out loud, there’s a bird in there! And so I painted in the outline of a bird and added some more acrylic wash colours before my time was up.

The point I’m getting to is this and exactly what Nina told me yesterday: never try to paint what is in your mind and try to recreate it because it will always fall short of your ideas. Just paint intuitively what you feel and build on that; explore where it leads you. And I can vouch for that: I found a bird in my garden painting that I never knew was there!

Nina also said every day, take a painting paper sketch/notebook and a box of crayons and draw, just draw anything from your intuition to keep flowing. Consider it doodling. And so I will.

I go again next Monday, and perhaps by day’s end I’ll have finished my first painting, or maybe not. But when I do, I certainly will post it here to show you where your soul can take you if you just:

a) open up, and

b) go to the teacher.

Loving the process! And loving the teacher! /mw