Forcing Patience

This winter/spring semester, I used my tuition waiver from the college where I teach to sign up for a college level watercolor class. About a year ago, I took Painting I that focused on acrylic painting, and I learned a ton. But I was very aware that my main strategy in that mode was "layering." As someone with little patience for precision, I like to plop paint on canvas and then just keep painting over it and over it until it looks like what I want it to. I knew watercolor would challenge me in this way as it doesn't really allow for that strategy. And I was very, very right about that.

As you can see from my early assignments above, I've had some troubles. My instructor (who is also my colleague) was trying to kindly give me suggestions about my first try at graded washes (top left). She mentioned the "inconsistencies" and then noted "I'm trying not to use the word 'blotches.'" But yes, blotches is the word. Big old blotches seems to be the name of the game as I get used to watercolor.

I didn't know it at the time, but I was working on the blotchy mini sky (second from left) while Alex Pretti was being killed and in the moments following that incident as the people of our city and state were finding out about this second homicide by ICE agents in Minnesota. I was feeling so angry and overwhelmed while I worked this. I literally wanted to quit the class. Now, I wonder how much of that intensity was from the collective energy of fear, bewilderment, and grief that most certainly was washing through all of us in those moments.

But yes, I wanted to withdraw. Instead, later that weekend, I attempted another unassigned round of graded washes (third from left). They seem to be better. Yes, there are blotches, but I'm getting a bit more able to control the paint on the page. Then, I did the final blue-forest painting on artist-grade watercolor paper following a tutorial on layering with different values. Clearly, that went a bit better. I see the tiniest bit of hope.

Even so, there's a big part of me that just wants to be done with this watercolor nonsense. I have activism to do, after all, and the world is prehaps too intense for me to learn watercolor right now. At the same time, maybe that's the point. Maybe I'm supposed to be sitting in discomfort in that space to prepare me for sitting in discomfort to do the work that our world needs me to do right now. Watercolor doesn't really seem like the most ideal modality to express this anger and fear and sadness, yet maybe it is more of the process of pushing up against the hard things that might allow me to unpack and feel these hard things all of us must feel to move through and into what is next.

For now, I continue. I have a very blotchy color-mixing chart ready to turn in (I may try again at that one before the deadline), and I'm not looking forward to whatever buttons this class is going to push for me next. Yet there is something about the discomfort of it that I think might just be making me stronger. And hopefully a bit better at watercolor. Time will tell.