First “real” painting

OK, well, yesterday I finally made my first “real” painting, following a class exercise to paint a simple orchid plant with leaves and flowers. The instructor is informed largely by a manual called The Mustard Seed Garden, which offers a number of “rules” for Chinese painting. The interesting thing is that, despite the use of certain conventions and restrictions, not unlike Western renaissance painting notions about perspective and so on, this approach to Chinese painting allows for quite a bit of freedom. In an exercise like this one, the instructor encourages students to choose for themselves where and how many leaves and blossoms to put in, while remaining within the “rules.” So, don’t have more than two leaves intersect; don’t have leaves intersect at an exact 90 degree angle. But put them where you see fit.. Put in however many feels right. Interestingly and amusingly, this for me evoked, of all things, Bob Ross. As someone who always felt uncomfortable in, and thus grew to really dislike, art class in elementary school, one of the strangely positive experiences around art-making that I had, however indirect, was watching Bob Ross’s painting show on PBS TV. The nurturing, nonjudgmental, calm atmosphere that Bob created, his ideas about “happy accidents,” or, after painting a tree or bush, putting in another on a whim after saying “….and we’re gonna give him a little friend,” almost made me want to paint. This was in stark contrast with my perception of painters from Kandinsky to Matisse to Pollack as lofty, rarefied, hypertalented, Artists with a capital “A,” toiling away in attic studios driven only by their own internal genius, releasing their work to inspire the fawning – or scathing – reactions of critics, leaving others to struggle to project meaning onto their work. I perceived the “real” art world as incredibly “cool” and totally unreachable. I loved looking at paintings, and, when I had the opportunity, talking to painters I knew personally, admiring both their work and their inspiringly messy studio spaces filled with unfamiliar intoxicating colors and smells. Anyway, Chinese painting seemed, and seems, far from either of these visions of what painting is about, and seems to offer a pathway through into a different world, free from either the welcoming kitschiness of Bob Ross or the seductive bohemianism of, say, abstract expressionism.