I’ve been writing a lot on my blog, I’m sure you’ve noticed. I find the more I paint the more words I have about stuff. I sit and I wait for paint to dry, sometimes I move the canvas and work on the board, or another canvas. But I’m producing with a serious bent. More serious than I’ve ever painted before. Painting was never something I liked, never something I explored. It was frustration. I looked at canvases as my arch-nemesis. Paper was my friend, my ally I knew it could tell you how it would respond to paint. Canvas, bent and bowed to my brush, there was give where I didn’t want there to be. Paper taped to board, that is where it was at.

Now I look to my brushes, I have rediscovered them. I’ve taught myself to use them, control them, and trite it may be bend them to my will and get the paint to respond the way I WANT IT TO.

Go with the flow, make it happen. I have learned to manipulate the paint. Sad to say that never happened in school, a million years ago, when my classmates were figuring out PAINT. I was figuring out ME and who I fit in. Paint was the least of my worries. Life took its course and here I am, older wiser and finally figuring out paint.

Honestly, I feel stupid that I spent all that time in school with brush in hand (2 painting courses and a course devoted to watercolors) and I wasted it. Semesters of work of the most boring banal variety and here I am just now LEARNING to paint. Teaching myself.

To all of you entering art school this week or next think of how to teach yourself, how do you learn? Are you figuring out you? Or are you figuring out the paint? Spend the time to figure out the paint. You’ll never have the time again in your life. I so very much wish I had not squandered the gift that was going to school. Don’t think for a minute I learned nothing in school, I learned heaps about paint but not the connection you need to feel it and want to use it.