PAINTING OUTDOORS IN PUBLIC places has a pleasant benefit. Passersby often stop to watch and engage in conversion. The two things most often heard are, “Oh, that’s beautiful,” and “Do you sell those?” This is music to the painter’s ears, though the painting may not in fact be going well, and these nice folks never buy anything anyway.
My favorite comment, however, is, “Oh, that looks so relaxing.”
I’ve heard that one often enough that, finally, I fashioned a comeback that was brief and quiet honest. “Actually, mam, it’s quite stressful.”
As this sort of conversation develops, as it did most recently while I painted outdoors at the Harpers Ferry, West Virginia, train tunnel, the kind onlooker stuck to her preconception about painting. In turn, I tried to reason out the opposing position.
First, I said, you are typically standing on your feet for three to five hours. In some places, parking is hard to find. So you’ve toted, or rolled, your forty pounds of equipment endless blocks to get a good vista. Indoors or outdoors, meanwhile, no painter wants to “fail” at a painting, and failure can add degrees of stress. (Though I concede that a lot of painting falls under the heading of practice, sketching, and at worst just killing time in the trade.)
Usually, with all the preparation needed to do serious painting, you want things to go well, step by step. You want to have a good painting—worth the time and effort—in the end. This is the inescapable stress of the craft. Painters have found one way out of this cul de sac, and it’s called “enjoy the process, forget the product.” This is taught widely now in art schools: Art-making as process. To be attached to the final product is to be too “precious,” a kind of no-no.
Popular art magazines now feature concepts such as “mindfulness,” that is, putting watercolor on paper and just letting the process, water, and colors flow. Taken to extremes, we now have the “wine and paint” party: The intent is to relax, be creative, get a buzz, and be sociable. These events are more party planning than serious painting. Nothing wrong with that. Every high-strung painter does need to relax and let go every once in a while.
Still, all the stress of painting is not futile. It is part of building up to a moment of transcending the obstacles: The vision has been obtained, the first draft is going well, the composition and colors are falling in place. Still, there is stress. They say you have to start a painting well to end up with something good. True enough, but I find that the hardest part is the conclusion. If the painting is not pulled together in the final stages, then all that went before is lost.
A painting always seems to have this final crossroads, this last moment of stress, before you can say the thing will “work,” even achieve flashes of brilliance. There’s a theory in psychology that stress is actually healthy, squeezing out excellence and productivity, and painting has these moments.
Back at Harpers Ferry, I couldn’t go into all this with the kind lady. She was accompanied by her daughter, a bright student, no doubt. So I turned to her and asked, “When you are studying for the final exam to get an A, is that relaxing or stressful?”
Without a pause, she said, “Stressful.”
Still, her mother insisted that what I was doing looked like a very relaxing experience. No harm done there—if our public wants to see us as carefree and relaxed in our chosen vocation, it is probably all for the good. Public image, and all that—the artist as living above the fray.
larrywithamfineart@gmail.com