In our little adventures about the city together we discover a cafe that offers you paint and canvas and for a price you can sit and paint away to your hearts content. This is in itself of no interest to me, I can paint plenty badly enough on my own without anyone watching, but she's excited. And to be truthful I'm a little interested in the social component of it all, they have various themed nights you can take advantage of, and so one afternoon off when we're wandering we stop in and decide to paint a couple of small canvases...
...checking out the shop/cafe, bad canvases everywhere adorn the walls, they're none of them good, amateurish in that grade-eight sense, representational, recognizable, but by no means aesthetic or intellectually stimulating...
...the proprietor, she's chatting with us, explaining the shop, the "Concept" to us, I ask about the paintings on the walls, they're hers, I'm flabbergasted, stunned, it doesn't add up, thankfully for once in my life I've exercised some slight discretion and bit my tongue...
The proprietor, she's beautiful, articulate, yet somehow she doesn't get it...it's like she's never visited a gallery in her life, or saw a reasonably good painting...she paints, inane things, without judgement or censure, and judges each one a masterpiece, or if not a masterpiece certainly worthy of displaying...I almost want to ask if they're for sale, but that would be cruel, the ass-hole in me speaking, no need for that...
...she has no internal Monologue, and while that internal critic, it can be damning, sometimes, well, sometimes you might just want to listen to it. I'm almost jealous. I paint, badly, but I know it, and of those few paintings I've tried most are embarrassments to be laughed at and apologized for when visiting family members & friends...that said, not ALL were bad, just most...
...but that might not be her theory, what she wants to do is to inspire others to paint, the "If I can than so can you" mentality, she's baring it all, it's art as process, without judgement, focusing on the communal nature and enjoyable act of creation. And indeed most people will turn up similar results, and so by setting a low bar everyone that comes here will judge themselves kindly...
Van Gogh, believe it or not, painted a lot of shitty paintings before he became Van Gogh. An awful lot. But he knew. Those paintings don't survive, same with Picasso, every major artist, they had to put out the bad paintings before they got to the good ones. You imagine they knew, tried and tried again, they had to have known or they wouldn't have grown...
...her boyfriend, handsome, exceptionally well dressed with a bright red wankerchief in his breast pocket, it all works except for the kerchief, which screams "Wanker", the tell, as they say in Poker, comes in, they sit, we gather our paints and begin...
She needs to harmonize the colors of the paints. This grab whatever color you want, it's great for professionals, but for me, well, my inability to draw is trumped by my inability to mix and blend colors. A harmonized color palette - eg: Van Gogh (the colors he frequently used) would be useful for incompetents like me to get the results we want. Better results, anyways, the problem with the inner critic is it knows damned well how everything holds up and it's seldom kind...
The Italian Girl, she's excited, fills her paper plate with colors, tells me "I'm going to paint a butterfly!", she's kinda got that crazy look in her eyes, reminds me of when the daughter was around 4 years old she told me about the little man that lived in her head and told her things and for a long while I was afraid she might have a little too much of her mom in her, she didn't, it turned out, she later told me she was merely teasing me, winding me up, and I breathed a big sigh of relief, but the Italian Girl, she's not joking or winding me up, she's painting a butterfly...
I try a portrait. Doesn't work, inner critic, good shape, bad colors, details, blame the subject. Her butterfly, it's fine, she's excited, she tells me: "Next time I paint a FISH!'" and I have to laugh, each of our paintings, they're lame, mine the worst of the two, hers, exactly what she wanted, she's enchanting in her simplicity...
She enjoys it, I'll stock up on Dollarama paint and canvases, there will be amusing afternoons sitting on the balcony painting, there's no excuse, really, for my hideous absence of talent, given the low cost of supplies, no need for the best of materials when you don't have the skills, it's a shitty workman that blames his tools...
In the meantime her butterfly hangs on my wall, she can't take it home, her boyfriend would chasten her for spending money at a painting cafe and so I have to live with it until she finds a way to smuggle it into her house, apt punishment for the inner critic...