Learning to Teach, Learning to Paint

Learning to Teach, Learning to Paint

What’s on my mind lately is the art and discipline of learning to paint. How we learn to paint I imagine is similar to how we learn anything. It takes time and patience and dedication. Most importantly though it takes compassion with yourself as you learn and for me as I learn to teach.

Having a structured format in the learning process is essential. Just going for it can weild varying and frustrating results. Starting simple, one step at a time is key here and know what your goals are and what there is to accomplish in each session.

Most times in a painting workshop on day 1 we start by painting in black and white and with just 3 values. This could seem potentially boring or even silly. I see how people look at me suspiciously when I first tell them that we are going to spend an entire day painting in black and white. Disappointment is probably closer to what they’re experiencing, especially if you’ve traveled all the way to Italy to paint that Italian light, ahh!

The way to learn to paint that Italian light is starting at the beginning with values. People soon see how values before color are what create the world of light, depth, atmosphere and that feel of the hot sun beating down.

Then we can start on values in color, just 3 colors. Honestly you don’t need many more than 3 primary colors + white. Getting to know your colors and all the potential (and endless) variations of how to mix them is key to mastering your color mixing skills and understanding how to use the many subtle variations you can create in mixtures.

Often we want to put the cart before the horse and get out there and make our masterpiece! Paint the sky, paint the olive trees, those rolling hills crowned by the idyllic village on top.

 

How can I explain that sometimes, most times, the subject is not important. How you paint that subject is what shows your world to the viewer.

I battle a lot with balancing letting people be frustrated and having fun, both are important when learning to paint. Being frustrated is just a part of the process, there is only one way to get where you want to go and that is to start down the road, begin and be where you are with the longer distance in mind (there is no arrival).

I remember moving to Italy and beginning to learn Italian, it was embarrassing, painful and fun all at once. A two year old taught me the names of the animals by letting me play with his memory animal flashcards. When I realized that I spoke less Italian than a two year old, imagining that I would someday be completely fluent and be able to express myself in this foreign language was as the very limits of what I could imagine. Accepting the baby steps only changes your experience of the journey. Accepting where we are is the only way to get to the next level.

Learning to teach makes me understand just how much I care about painting- not just for myself because it is my profession, but also how much someone will newly appreciate painting when going to a museum or gallery having spent serious time looking and painting. Spending a week intensively studying the principles of painting makes visible worlds to the attuned eye that were unseen before. A painter gains an entirely new vocabulary with which he or she can now engage in an ongoing dialogue with painting and art for life. This is the real secondary mission of teaching painting- teaching people to appreciate art and artists and what it means to create something from a blank canvas with the whole world open before you, how truly exciting! (and not for the faint of heart)

In teaching, the teacher must get into very specific detail about technique: comparing and then painting light versus dark versus middle tones, how to create warm versus cool in order to make objects come forward or recede, being aware of using the brush and your strokes as an almost sculptural tool and so on.

What the teacher must always keep in mind is that these tools or principals of painting are only a means to an end, they are the grammatical structure so that we can first form first words, then sentences and then eventually an entire dissertation. The teacher must remember never to give formulaic solutions, but to let the student find their own solutions to each problem. When someone finds their own solution, they find they own entirely unique expression, which is the point of teaching anything- giving someone simply the tools and ability to create their own work and voice so that they can give the world what is theirs alone- their view of the world.

Art speaks to a common and shared human experience, showing us the vast range of our emotional world, while at the same time retaining a completely personal interpretation. This is why mastering the basic tools and principals is so important-to then find freedom in creating exactly what is personal to each person.