Image by JackPeasePhotography via Flickr. (CC) 

Last year, in a fit of blinding courage, I started taking an oil painting class. I’ve been talking about learning to paint for a long time. There are artists all over my family and I’m envious of what they can do. My aunt and two cousins are painters, another’s a sculptor, Mom was fabulous at portraits in pencil or charcoal, two of my siblings are good photographers. In my thirties, I was a sweater designer, which is also art but of a slightly more constrained sort. Then I became a writer and only expressed my visual glee through paint on my walls and flowers in the yard.

My friend Jane finally cajoled me into her art class, taught by a guy whose paintings I love. He’s not the most step-by-step teacher, but when I get lost Jane can answer my questions. We paint from photographs, and I’m happy to say that after a year I have produced three small oils.

Maybe you know what it’s like to be competent all the time and then go back to being a rank beginner. Humbling. But kind of liberating, too. I flip-flop between impatience at not knowing how to accomplish what I’m aiming for and little shivers of delight at mixing a wonderful color or really capturing the contour of a hillside. Right now I’m sticking to one subject: Mt. Tamalpais. I grew up on this mountain’s flanks near San Francisco — its shape is imprinted on my retinas. So far I’ve painted it from two sides and I’m about to embark on a third view, not of the whole mountain, just cliffs falling into the ocean near Stinson Beach.

What’s most instructive about this class is how hard it is to see the thing you’re looking at. The brain really wants to take short-cuts, make assumptions, average out what it knows about, in my case, mountains, and then move on. When I look at a photo my brain says, “Oh, yeah — mountain at this angle, sky this color, no problem.” Then I paint what I thought I saw and the mountain’s top is too low and way off center, the sky isn’t that smoky gray-blue at all, it has blue, gray, green, and three different shades of yellow in it. Which doesn’t make any sense but now I’m learning to look closer, I can see those colors.

If I’m getting shape and color so wrong in a simple 8 by 10 landscape, what is my brain making of more complicated matters like world politics and human relationships? It doesn’t bear thinking about, except in the larger sense of arguing for patience, to remind me there’s more to certain situations than meets the brain, even if it’s all there right before my eyes.

Starting over has had other benefits — reminding me what it’s like to know nothing, not even what questions to ask, which makes me a more compassionate teacher. Taking me back to my early years of writing so I can appreciate how far I’ve come. And giving me the felt experience of acquiring a new skill. Not that we’ll necessarily need more landscape painters if the world falls apart, but now I know I’m not too old to learn new tricks, so I can cope with whatever happens.

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