I’m about to start a brief but intense course through Emily
Carr on painting outdoors. I have to use
materials I have never used; acrylics, after struggling for the last 15 years
with watercolour. I’ve engaged in an
epic battle to find the right greens with watercolour, and have come to an
‘almost’ compromise on many of them, and now suddenly this new viscous, thick
and unsubtle medium. “Oh,” says my
husband blithely, “you’ll love it. You
can just paint right over anything you don’t like.” But the greens! They are like squirrels on
acid. I sit before my little box of
paints and am overwhelmed.
The thing about
painting outdoors in BC is you need some greens. I am constantly distracted by the layerings
of greens in almost any scene I pass. I
have a little box at the back of my brain that constantly runs a commentary on
them; ‘yellow with burnt umber? Pthalo? No…that colour was invented by
masochists…how to get that dark forest colour?” all while I’m trying to drive and
remember what I’m supposed to be out to pick up. And then one day I’ll finally sit down and
try to use the acrylics to re create the greens in a photo I’ve taken and come out in the end with
something lurid and intense that bears no resemblance to a landscape anywhere
. I have failed again, I tell myself,
to capture life. Its intensity, its
subtlety, its complexity.
I am trying hard to catch
some real essence, as if in doing it I could hold onto it forever, stave off
ever having to leave. I look at the
water colours (still my favorite medium to look at) that I love, I feel as if
their painters had stopped time, they, and that scene, are forever. They are like revisiting a favorite
novel. When you open the pages the
characters fly out, noisy, chattering, doing, ready to get back at their lives
(and thanks for opening the pages, we were rigid with boredom here!)
I have a painting I
bought in Dorset last year…an early morning scene on a village green, with the
sun just spreading warmth across the grass, the house on the left still in
shadow, its inhabitants about to have their floors bathed in gold as the sun
hits their windows. I am there, in that
morning, every time I look at it; smelling the mid summer green of the
shrubbery, washed in my favorite time of day; that moment when anything is
possible, a feeling I was suffused with at any time of day or night when I was
younger, before my parents started dying in that irresponsible way old people
have, but now still feel every morning.
The man who painted
that was the now deceased father of the woman I bought it from. She charged very little to part with it. Her father is still alive here, just out of
the picture. A classic English watercolour.
I want to be him. Well, more
alive, if you know what I mean, but able to paint like that, capturing the
shifting shadows and tone changes on an early morning swath of grass. In a week my course will start and I’ll be
out there with my acrylics. In a
desperate attempt to look like I know what I’m doing I’ve made a full page
colour chart of all the different greens I can get with the hyperactive
squirrels in my paint tubes. There are
only two so far that don’t make me lose the will to live. Wish me luck.
It’s my whole retirement I’m playing for here…
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