I've been trying to paint peonies. Flowers. 7 pages of notes now, sketches, ideas.
Now, translating it to canvas...blobs of muddy color, "daubs" makes it sound much too professional, I've roughed it in, painted it over, 2, 3, 4 times now, the Peony has changed it's direction - 360 degrees, following the sun-up-down-up-down, many times, every additional layer of paint pissing me off, watching a few, now dozens of peony-painting videos on YouTube, so many now that my YouTube recommendations are coming up with things I should NOT be doing with acrylics,...
Never mind, I've done 'em all, doing even more now, it's too fucking late.
There is one creator, a David Jansen, "Alla Prima" and "Lost and Found Edges", he's getting results.
I try to paint along with him. His Peonies and "Lost and Found" edges.
He's a pleasant demeanor, an "isn't this simple", Bob Ross sort of attitude, but with skill, not that Bob Ross didn't have any but I never admired his style, results, David Jansen, he knows what he's doing.
In under 3 minutes, real time, no speed up, no nothing, 3 minutes from mixing colors and laying them onto the paper, he's got results. A flower. I can see it. I slow the video down. Make my notes, paint along, I'm getting nowhere. Nowhere.
Look up more videos, in every medium. Different mediums, different brushes, Filberts, round, fans, 1/4 inch, 1/2 inch, 3/4 inch wedges, this one using only sponges, bits of foam, this one using a palette knife, this one using her fingers, this one using only a garbage can lid and beet juice, this one with a piece of cardboard, old newsprint, a discarded tire, clean dishrag or paper towel...
All these techniques, watercolor, gouache, acrylic, oil, pastels, tea, coffee, blood, motor-oil, sweat, semen, spray-paint, stencil, I'm getting overwhelmed and nowhere fast. I mean nowhere. Lie down, shut my eyes, I can picture it. I can rewind and play every video I've watched in my head. I can picture the flowers, turn them in my head, abstract them, yet try and follow along and...
I watch every tutorial, again and again, every fucking one, painting along with the exact same color palette, and nothing, more blotches, from the rickshaw and tuk-tuk painters of Thailand and Nepal to the old masters styled Dutch and European artists, and every fucking housewife in between.
And trust me, there are a lot of crafty housewives that bought paint and brushes at Michaels, thought nothing about it, and decided to start a YouTube channel on how to paint Peonies. They're getting results. I often don't like them, but there's no denying they managed to paint flowers. Peonies.
This one, draws it out first on the canvas, fills it in, paint-by-numbers style. This one does it alla-prima, straight from the tube, blocks in the light and shadow, the cool and warm tones. There are hunreds of ways to do this, thousands even, and my own, inimitable, it quite literally by process of elimination has to be the only way not to paint Peonies in the world.
And layer after layer it just gets worse.
It doesn't matter, I watch, try them all. Anything would be better than what I'm getting.
And still nothing.
**
When I was a kid I learned to draw sharks. Nothing to it, draw the jaws, then the fins and the body and fill in the eyes and the gills and maybe a few lampreys. I drew good sharks. It was always the same shark, a great white shark, but if I changed the tail a bit or the jaws I could pass it as a different shark. And if I drew a tiny diver near to it I could claim it was a Megalodon.
**
For some reason I'm not learning to paint flowers. I've sketched, doodled, drawn, outlined, a dozen abstractions. I should have gotten this by now. There are other things to be done, other inspirations, and there's no surer way to find sideways inspiration than confront the stupid and obvious in front of you.
I should be loving this, and I've come to dread it, hate it, loathe each defeat, I'm in the artist's funk, I should be welcoming the new techniques, I've intellectualized every one, but the execution, well, the execution is proving a different story...
I'm watching videos where I fucking hate the results, despise them, but I have to acknowledge, they're getting results, and regardless of my opinions they can say they drew a flower, what can I say? I'm begrudging every drop of wasted color, and there are many drops. Tubes even. Big tubes.
And this is not what I want anyways, their paintings, flowers by their nature, luminous, hanging suspended, motion, the gradients, spontaneity, making shapes retreat, advance, colors, warm, cool, background, foreground, how to rough in an outline, how to fuck it up. I'm looking for the balance of tones that lift it from the canvas in a halo of light, all I'm ending up with is muddy blobs of color, ever deepening, if I get a petal - by luck, or accident, it's quickly lost in the ensuing bloodbath of Titanium White and Quinacridone reds and pinks.
I need a neurologist.
I pace, scrape paint, use it up, wait for it to dry so I can try again. More fucking videos.
Music, I'd like music with this, to relax me while I stress out looking at shitty flowers on my phone and worse than shitty flowers on my canvas, while I re-watch YouTube How-To Videos, but the radio, 'tis the season for it to be completely unlistenable, wretched, and you may have guessed but to be clear I'm definitely not in the mood...I need trip hop, or some violent femmes, harder, sharper edges, I'm thrashing about, with the brush, no Xmas cheer for me....
I'm the hanged man, Odin from Yggdrasil, the world tree, waiting, patiently, for some sort of epiphany, it should not be this tough, in fact it isn't that tough, I know that, sat through how many witless uninspired videos of people getting far superior results, what was once a pleasure has become odious to me, the journey offensive insofar as I can see the destination, this is not where I set out for, not at all...
What is up? I want to cook food. I look up recipe. I don't need to watch people cook, only need to follow instructions. And, at best, I follow them vaguely, to my taste, and I get edible results. Good results even or sometimes.
I read book. I write sentence. Readable sentence. It's a sentence.
I watch water bomber. Film water bomber. I have a video. You've seen it.
I see. I take picture. I have picture.
I hear music. I bang on drum. I make noise.
***
When I first started to paint I thought I'd figure it out. I didn't need to paint a flower, or a great flower, just one I liked. My results varied but I was figuring it out. Now - with all this accelerated learning, with instruction at my fingertips, the very library of Alexandria, the font of all instructable human knowledge, and....well, results do vary.
***
I have pictures of flowers. I have paint. I have painted, and occasionally with results that pleased me. Why the fuck can I not paint a fucking flower??
I try and fix it with the palette knife, but you can't fix what you never had, never, for a moment, I'm not even failing, fail is orders of magnitude above my level, fail is that woman I saw at a garage sale in Calgary some many years and lifetimes ago that was selling pictures she'd done of the poseable artist's mannequin. You know, the wooden ones that they sell at every art store, a guide to shape, action, only she'd not thought to superimpose a human onto it, merely painted the wooden form held together with elastic. Not a study in shadow, or motion, merely what she painted, without irony. I'm thinking of her again now with admiration.
I like to paint, the process, it's a luxury I deny myself, postpone, put off, like I do with all things I like, I have to "earn" the privilege, or something else, I've an impetus to self destruction, annihilation, done now through avoiding the process. Better to avoid the process than confront the results.
I distract myself, watch more videos. Try different techniques. I play chess online at Lichess.org, but the results there are mirroring my results on Canvas. I'm in a funk for sure. I go to Oso for coffee, it's busy, but there's an artist there...she got results, painted a bird, I can see it's a bird. It's OK - good, even, but you can see the work, a little too painstaking, I'm going for the effortless few broad paint strokes that show I know what I'm doing.
I haven't a fucking clue.
This, the easel in the living room, the lack of living space, a heap of unpainted canvases, my place, it's a studio, not a living space.
I will crack this. And then it will be bursts of peonies, roses upon canvas, carnations, gladiolas, morning glories and the rarest of orchids, hitherto undreamt of creations, daisies, fuchsias, delphiniums, gladiolas, lilies, chrysanthemums, azaleas, sunflowers, Still-Life one after another, 5 in a day. I could go on...
But first, somehow, I've got to fucking finish up these Peonies. Fucking Peonies.