Six weeks into painting classes and still the overriding feeling is total terror. Total terror.

I have been learning the craft of oil painting from an eccentric and amazing teacher here on Bainbridge. She is a flurry of activity and bubbling over with stories that help coax us from one frightening learning concept to the next.  Just when I think I will collapse from  internal stress (Do I put yellow here? or do I put green? ), our fearless teacher struts up, grabs a painting knife and smears purple across my seamingly gray sky landscape. Voila, she is right every time, and the sky is purple in the dark clouds, and I breath and swipe right behind her.

This is how I spend Tuesday nights.

Despite how far I’ve come (and truly, if you saw the pear I painted, well…watch out Van Gogh), each week is the same roller coaster trip, filled with dread. Each stroke is impossible somehow and sometimes during class the teacher actually tells me to put the brush down and breath.

This is not very me?!  I like to throw myself at things and smash into them until I figure out how they work. Painting though, well, painting makes me feel vulnerable and scared of imperfection.  I’m paying attention to this.

What is it about being an artist that is both such a calling and also such an impossibility? I think we must all have a little bit of artist in us but at some point, somewhere along our life’s early journey, a message was sent that we shouldn’t express it.  We aren’t good enough. Maybe it’s dance, maybe it’s singing, maybe it’s painting – we all have something buried in there, I think – and for some it’s crying to get out.

I didn’t realize how deeply I harbored a fear of this craft, and truly how hard it would be to learn.  This is science, and alchemy and emotion on canvas and I am just a whimsy it’s allowing to participate.  Painting is not for wimps. Whew.

Pictured here is a work in progress. Fort Ward Park view of the Sound.