I eagerly unpack the bag of art supplies I just bought at the store. It has all the basics I need to start painting: brushes, paints, canvas paper and disposable palettes. I arrange them all out on the table, then jokingly tell my wife not to interrupt me for the next 30 minutes, because a genius is at work. Today, for the first time in over seven years, I am going to paint.
I squeeze out too much paint the first time around – it really has been a while. No biggie though; breaking the protective coating on my new brushes, I dip them in water to loosen them up, then grab some paint on the bristles.
This is the moment I’ve been waiting for. I’ve been wanting to explore painting again for a long time. It’s another creative outlet, but it also offers a ton of parallels between it and the other art forms I practice, like photography and karate. To better understand painting is to better understand those arts. I touch the brush down on the canvas and watch it glide across the canvas like a figure skater glides across the ice.
The first technique I want to try is blending, which is the process of creating a gradient between two different colours. I want to blend red into yellow, to create the fiery hues often seen in dramatic sunsets. As I start to blend the two together, I realize I’ve used too much red and not enough yellow. The result is more of a red-orange gradient, not yellow-orange. I dip the brush back in the yellow and try to paint over top… it barely moves the needle on the colour. Lesson learned!
After a few more unsuccessful attempts at getting the mix right, I decide to change it up. I had been watching a video on how to paint realistic clouds, and was eager to give the technique a try. First I paint the background. Then I add the shadows, and then progressively move up toward the highlights. When at last I finished, I sit back to take in my work, which was… underwhelming. My clouds look like reject cotton balls.
As I lament the cartoony nature of my clouds, I realize something: I’m smiling. I had been smiling the whole time, and wasn’t even aware of it. See, here’s the thing: the stuff I painted was pretty bad. But the process of painting, of creating… that felt pretty good. It didn’t matter how bad the first few strokes of my brush were; what mattered to me was that I had begun. Every subsequent attempt would bring with it new discoveries, new lessons learned.
The thought reminds me of how I felt when I tried out my first few blocks in that first karate class, or how, the first time I tried cooking steak, I burnt it nearly to a crisp. In those instances, the feeling was the same. It may not have turned out right, but hey, it was a start. Most people are too scared to even get that far.
There’s a quote I once read by Vincent Van Gogh that has stuck with me ever since. He said, “If you hear a voice within you say ‘you cannot paint,’ then by all means paint and that voice will be silenced.” It isn’t just painting advice; it’s life advice.
If we can learn to love the first imperfect strokes of the paint brush, the first few disjointed words on a page, the first over-cooked steak, and the first wobbly low block of our martial arts journey – if we can just recognize that they are the first, necessary step toward something greater – then our possibilities are limited only by what our imaginations can conceive. Looking back on my work and my lesson for the day, I decide it’s beautifully flawed. I smile to myself, dipping my brush in a shade of deep green as I prepare to paint my first perfectly imperfect tree.
