Tag Archives: creativity

Copying the Masters

I have more talent with words than watercolor, and since I will probably never meet the 10,000 hours required for mastery of a skill, I will likely remain a more accomplished writer than painter. Yet I feel more artist than writer these days. I am more compelled to paint than to write. I am less interested in applying a honed skill than practicing a new one. I surprise my serious self by being so glad to play and to laugh at my painting blunders. Creating art, imperfect as it may be, is balm and vitamin to my evolving, aging spirit, a more nourishing and colorful expression of my existence in this autumn of my life. Art inspires my inner child, rejuvenates my aching heart, and checks my ego at the door of my Archive room, where I paint. It both heals and challenges me.

When I open the watercolor paints, spritz them with water, and consider the blank paper, I feel no pressure to create, no striving to be good, no fear that what emerges on the page might be terrible. In fact, I welcome the terrible. I enjoy the mistakes and happy accidents. I laugh out loud at my feeble attempts at noses and fingers and mixing a bright and perfect shade of purple. It is the practice of art that nourishes my soul, not the art (or anti-art) that emerges from the water and pigment on paper.

As I know that anyone who writes regularly, whether they ever publish or not, is a writer, I know that I am an artist, no matter the level of skill I possess now or have the capacity to attain. To sit down most days and draw, paint, or collage something into existence is what makes me an artist. To create ANYTHING with an open heart that makes someone feel something is a creative expression. Bouquets of flowers from the garden arranged in a vase. A home-made meal cooked with love and intention. A craft cocktail, garnished with flair. Daily doodling in the margins of the engagement calendar. All is art and the creator an artist.

When I began watercolor painting three years ago, a suggestion of my therapist to practice the art of letting go, I never anticipated that art would become as important to me as writing. I immediately loved painting and felt the physical healing of the practice, but I believed it would be a passing fancy. I have never been very good at sticking out activities that do not immediately feel easy. Watercolor is willful, and it frustrated the persnickety editor in me, but it soon became a dance, a playground, a messy field of weeds and wildflowers, cartoon figures and a belly laugh. Painting makes me feel like a child drawing with sidewalk chalk in the sun.

As an artist I want to gently improve my painting skills, not with a mind to sell or exhibit my work, but rather for the enhanced pleasure of creating art. I want to better mix colors, to learn to paint without penciling out a crummy sketch first, to trust the water more, to lean into abstract representations of what I see, and to feel content to paint with my imperfect, grieving, laughing heart.

To this end of honing skills, I recently began a lighthearted but practical short project. In a 4″x6″ sketchpad of fifteen watercolor pages, I am copying fifteen paintings by master artists. From The Little Big Book of Art, a favorite publication that I have enjoyed for years, I selected fifteen paintings to copy; or, perhaps, reference would be a better word for such an unskilled, untrained artist such as my humble self. The idea is to paint what I see, practice mixing colors to match the paintings as they appear in my little book, and to gain confidence with the paint and the brushes. The small size of the paper was intentional, the purpose to complete each painting within an hour or so, no plan to rework or retouch. No pressure to succeed. No striving to get my representations even close to my idea of perfect. No fear of miserable failure.

So far so good on all counts. I have tackled three thus far, and it has been a blast. I am using a set of jelly gouache watercolor paints with which I had failed to bond. It was a material choice that reduced expectations and put me even more at ease with the audacious idea that I could paint copies of great paintings. I am using paints I was wasting, a $1.99 sketchbook, and devoting minimal time to the project, and so nothing to lose and only learning (and humility) to gain.

Child Playing with a Ball (1899) by Félix Edouard Vallotton (1865-1925) was first. I started with this one because it seemed the easiest of my selections to approximate. With its dreamy park landscape and impressionist figure I deemed it a realistic goal. No faces or fingers to fiddle with, no detailed objects more complex than that simple red ball. It was not more difficult than I thought it would be, because I knew that every painting I selected would be a lofty challenge. Yet it surprised me in unexpected ways and proved a perfect first attempt. It taught me that it can be better for me to paint without a sketch. My grossly imperfect sketches often box me into an intention that is ill-conceived in the first place, and they sometimes limit the expression that pools upon the paper. I will still do my cartoon-like and illustrative paintings by drawing them first, but now I will attempt more free-flowing work with ease and confidence. My pointy elbowed intentions with jagged pencil lines is not the only way for me to express my creative spirit.

The Blue Vase (1889-90) by Paul Cézanne (1839-1906) was my second painting, and such a delightful hour spent. Objects are so much easier for me than people. My colors don’t match, my perspective is askew, my flowers are a different species entirely, and the arrangement possesses its own ratio of blooms and leaves. Yet I did, indeed, paint a blue vase on a table, without penciling it in first. The bottle is a bottle and the fruits are fruits. I struggled to create different values of grays. I learned that mixing reds is a wonder and will never again rely solely on the red in my pan set of watercolors. I also discovered that while still life is still not my inclination, I am going to give it a good chance and experiment with painting still life with my unique sense of humor and perspective.

My third attempt was the Portrait of Maddelena Doni (1505) by Raphael (1483-1520), and the best thing I can say about this painting is that I laughed all the way through it. I struggled with Maddelena’s nose and her dress and the wispy tree in the background. Her stupid headband was an unexpected trial. I tried and failed three times to paint her hands using mixed shades of pink and tan and brown; then I cheated and tried to draw in her hands with pencil and paint over them, which failed even more miserably than the first two attempts with just paint. Finally, I threw up my hands and collaged a bouquet made of my own painted collage paper and happily placed it over her disastrous blob hands. I also painted a bulky cornstalk in the place of that damned delicate tree. And then I giggled as I embraced with cheek and aplomb the subject’s orange and blue dress and made her an alum of my own alma mater.

I may have been trying to paint a copy of a Raphael, but what I produced was my own little piece of terrible, wonderful art.

I am in love with this ridiculous project and delighted with the practice and the learning. It is absurd and audacious, perhaps, but it is a liberation. Art is, after all, just an expression of a thing through the eyes of one person. Even if it starts out a “copy” it becomes, in the end, a unique expression of the artist who sat down to make it with her own two hands. The first three paintings showed me that I should with the remaining twelve paintings represent them rather than copy them and generously paint them in my own voice. I still intend to mix colors with the intention to match, represent in some way the subject or the scene of each painting to the best of my limited ability, and keep to my rule of no pencil sketching. However, I have license change it up, skip or even give up on parts (like hands), and add a bit of whimsy (like collage) if inspiration blooms.

Side-by-side with the paintings of the masters, my paintings are nothing to write home about. Then why in the hell are you writing about them, you ask? I answer by saying that my painting of Maddelena Doni (2026) is all Stacy Lynn. It has the expressive large eyes I always paint, a characteristic nose-ish, and my sense of humor. It is art. It is my art. Because as I said before and repeat here with emphasis, art is anything that makes a single person feel something, even if that single person is the artist herself.

And this artist is feeling free and inspired.

Dissonance

Recently I began a new project that combines writing and painting. Since I am a comfortable writer but a novice, unskilled painter, I planned to write a series of short essays and then illustrate them with watercolor. My therapist suggested that I experiment with the reverse, paint first and then write an essay. It was a terrifying prospect, so I put it off until  two weeks ago when I had an idea for a safe test, a photograph of myself doing a cartwheel in my yoga garden.

The painting is ridiculous, much like the photograph, which I thought would provoke a funny essay about how bad I am at painting, how weird it is that I like being physically upside down, and how unusual it is to be a 57-year-old woman who can and frequently does turn cartwheels. But it was not a humorous essay, even as my right humerus bone in the painting is a hoot of disproportion. The essay had nothing at all to do with my joy of cartwheels and the good rush of blood to my head. The words that came out of me instead were an emotional outpouring of how upside down I have felt all this year. Not the good kind of upside down, like a downward dog or a cartwheel, but a bad upside down like discombobulated. Dizzy. Dazed and confused. The kind of upside down that makes me want to vomit.

Grief and loneliness and the uncertainty of this damned, crazy world always make me feel sideways. Feeling sideways is just life. Nothing special about me. We all have forces that knock us askew. I have learned to balance the kind of sideways that life inflicts upon me. I counter it with creative and calm remedies I daily employ to stay upright. I practice yoga. I write. I paint. I walk, cuddle my dogs, and watch birds. Yet all during this productive year, this contented, creative, cathartic year, a new and different force threatened my uprightness. Numbers. Stupid numbers. All in my head, but these seemingly real numbers had done a number on my equilibrium; 10, 30, 57, and 80 had turned me upside down.

Mack should have turned 30 in March, and on October 7, 2024, she will be gone 10 years. Mack has been gone half the time she was here on this earth, and it is a fact that astounds me. I cannot bear it. The truth of it has been impossible to face, and spending the past twelve months being the age my dad was when he died made it more difficult. Being 57 has been like having an anvil of death hanging from a thread above my head. My dad should have turned 80 this year, and though I know so well the sharp edges of living, year after year after year, without my daughter, I want to see 80. I need to keep Mack’s memories for so much longer than a decade.

A week after painting and writing the upside-down essay, I sat at my laptop to write this annual blog post to commemorate the anniversary of Mack’s death. I couldn’t do it. I was worked up by what the painting-first, writing-second process had unearthed and unleashed. It is not at all a bad thing to examine my emotions but looking for answers to my upside down made it hard to find the words to express my state of disorientation, my fear of the numbers.

But while I was stumbling and struggling to right myself, I got an unexpected email. A watercolor of mine was accepted for publication in a quirky online journal called Waves. It was a self-portrait I had done while recovering from the deep removal of skin cancer from my ear. I painted it to find humor in my fear about the plastic surgery I would have to repair the damage. The issue of Waves in which “My Left Ear” appears is entitled “Dissonance.”

Dissonance. Yes, that is precisely what I was feeling.

Dissonance: the lack of harmony among musical notes.

Dissonance explained my year, my numbers, and my false belief that I was upside down in a bad way. Some notes of my life this past year have been lovely chimes out of creative flurry, the completion of a new book, professional accomplishment, and the establishment of new friendships. Other notes clunked from fear, exhaustion, and physical pain. The note of those damned numbers clanked. The note of no yoga for five weeks of convalescence honked like an injured goose. The note of my trepidation of a new project I wasn’t sure I had the talent to do justice thumped a little too deeply to be good bass. And grief, oh my dear constant grief, is always an unharmonious whisper.

Dissonance is awkward and unpleasant, but it makes you long for melody. It makes you want to hear and see and feel your life differently. I had lost my tune. My song was, indeed, dissonant, but I was still singing.

In painting, perspective is one of the hardest skills to master, much as perspective in real life is almost always hard learned. Recasting my year as dissonance didn’t erase the worry that had plagued me, nor did it give me hope that the next year of my life will be harmonious or even a little less dissonant. It didn’t help me figure out how to write about what it means to me that I’ve passed ten years without Mack, either. A perspective of dissonance does, however, give me back my beautiful and necessary upside down, my downward dogs and my cartwheels. Oddly, too, the idea of dissonance is a gentle reminder that I am only human.

A definition of dissonance might also have soothed my dread of those dastardly numbers.

No.

No, actually, as Mack’s spirit is reminding me as I write this, it is just that the year of awful numbers will soon come to an end. After breathing and sobbing through another October 7, I will turn 58 on October 9, and then I will fall sideways into whatever future starts for me on October 10.

There is precious little we can control. Life will blow us off our feet in terrible and beautiful directions we cannot predetermine. Dissonance is just the range of all emotions, the far and wide of the good, and the depth of the sorrow that life gives us. Dissonance keeps us awake and alive. It helps us appreciate the precious melodies. Mack is alive for me in my dissonance and in my melody. She is with me in the joyful upside down. She will be with me ever still, going forward, laughing at my ridiculous paintings, teasing me out of the dark hours, and singing be back into tune so I can keep her stories and continue writing and painting my own.

On painting Mack: I find it very painful to paint her face and to imagine her in watercolor. Watercolor is like a dream, and I long to paint her alive. I have tried and failed to capture her lovely spirit. When I paint anything else, I am fearless, but painting Mack opens a vulnerability that is terrifying. But, when I am brave, I will keep trying to do her justice. My painting, after all, is not art, it is therapy. It will remain a work in progress, just like me.