How To Survive A Paint and Wine Class
Painting is a struggle. Let’s be honest, if you didn’t grow up as an artist or with an artistic force in your life, paint and wine classes can be an uphill battle disguised as social hour. Everyone is looking at a blank canvas and somehow everyone else is seeing butterflies and their grandfather reincarnated as a beautiful mountainscape. While everyone is painting away, making the first mark on a white canvas can be daunting.
As an art instructor, I have some insights, especially for beginners who feel alone while doing art with others.
The first mark is the hardest.
The first mark is the hardest. It sucks to pick one singular starting point. As a painter, the solution to trying to get started is to know that the original mark is probably not even going to be seen in the final piece. If the piece is dauntingly complicated, start by squinting your eyes, seeing it in a blurry form and think bigger to smaller. I always tell my students, start with the object farthest away from you and end with the thing closest to you. It’s tempting to go into achieving hyperrealism on a pet portrait but I always start my students with the background color. It makes for a great warm up and covers the majority of the canvas.
Nobody knows what they’re doing. I’m serious, it’s mistake after mistake, even for experienced artists.
As someone who does enjoy art, being creative is a practice of falling forward. Mixing the right colors is a weakness that many struggle with. If painting were a language, colors are the words and application looks a lot like stumbling into sentences. The entire painting creating a comprehensive, sometimes childish, dialogue from the painter. It may seem embarrassing but it’s okay to stutter, to not know the right word in the right place and to make “happy little accidents”. As I said in the previous section, mistakes are supposed to happen and you never ruin a piece unless you choose not to continue. Acrylic paint is magical in that you can just cover up anything you don’t like.
Leaning into the Inner Child
This is a struggle for older people especially. The farther you are from childhood the harder it is to produce the same perspective without adult cyncisim. In my experience, adults are more self critical and use humor as a defense mechanism to painting something less than perfect. So, my solution to this existential problem is to get funnier. Get funnier until you’re so focused on the piece that the process of color matching and covering the canvas is more mechanical and methodical. In a 2 hour class, around the 45 minute mark, everyone gets their funnies out and leans into practice. You’ll notice the room is no longer nervous energy but focused and quiet.
So…I actually like my painting now and I don’t want to mess it up.
At some point, most students will look at their canvas and think, “that’s actually…kind of good?”. It happens 80% of the time, and at that point messing up isn’t funny anymore and you actually care about your painting. The painting is usually unfinished at this point but some students become paralyzed that they’re going to mess up the good parts --they have no idea what to do next. My number one tip at this point is to take a deep breath and step away from the painting. It’s weirdly helpful to have a different perspective (go figure). At the really bad points, I’ll even turn the painting upside down. Experienced artists do this because as you work on a painting, you become used to how it looks. It becomes hard to see what to do next because you’re literally blind to your own creation.
Recognizing when to Stop
The last tip I’ll give for this is knowing when done is done. Usually it’s a combination of being exhausted from focusing on creating and a feeling of uncertain dissastisfaction. My solution for this is don’t end on a bad note. It’s better to step away than to give up from frustration. This can be the point where you lean over to your neighbor and ask for feedback (if not the teacher). External positivity is hella helpful at this point, in fact, it can be the deciding factor between loving and hating a piece. If you’re emotions are muddled toward your painting, reach out and dip into the well of fishing for compliments.
