Tag Archives: painting

On The Gift of Painting

It’s a beautiful Sunday morning, and Rick felt like painting outside where he could enjoy the air, birds, and golfers.

That’s the great thing about a portable easel. It’s portable.

I love it when he’s painting. It feels like the world is right and as it should be.

The feeling is the same as when I was a little kid in the basement “rec room” on a Saturday afternoon, with my Mom noodling away at her sewing machine, my Dad at his workbench sanding a piece of balsa wood for a model airplane, and a hockey game play-by-play streaming from the radio on his workbench.

Maybe the smell of the oil paint reminds me of the model airplane glue, or maybe it’s just the pace in the air of loved ones at leisure, poking away at things they get lost in with no deadlines in sight.

I’ve heard it said that “knowing when to stop” is a critical skill in painting. I think another equally important aspect of painting, at least for Rick, is knowing he doesn’t have to stop until he feels like it.

What a gift! To have a talent and interest in something that is so absorbing, challenging, expressive, releasing, grounding, and satisfying all at the same time…

… And then to also have the time and money to be able to do that thing.

It’s almost as good as being able to photograph and write about it on a beautiful Sunday morning.

horse art

Rick Solves The Comox Glacier

When the rain, fog, and clouds of Vancouver Island aren’t in the way, my parents have a splendid view of the Comox Glacier out of their living room window.

It rains a lot on Vancouver Island.

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Guests will often come and go and never catch a glimpse of the fabled edifice, so Rick painted it for them to hang beside the big window. At least this way when they’re socked in, it helps people see what they’re missing.

Come to think of it, that’s what artists do for the rest of us. They help us see what we’re missing.

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See that teeny splooge of red at the base of the evergreen on the right? That’s how much I know about the process of painting, just so we’re all clear.

However, I am becoming quite the expert at the process of watching Rick paint.

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Painting appears to be a strenuous exercise in problem solving, involving both seeing things as they really are and knowing how to trick the eye into seeing what we think should be there.

Until I started watching Rick paint, I hadn’t realized that I have only been processing my visual world as it makes sense to me, and this is not anywhere close to the same thing as seeing what’s really there.

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My favorite part is the guessing game I play with myself as I watch him paint.

(Well, that and the way his shoulder muscles flex. I think I may have mentioned before this makes me want to bite him. But he’s painting and also has a strange aversion to being bitten, so I refrain. Noble of me, don’t you think?)

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He’ll stare at the painting for a bit, then squirt out a splotch of the most unlikely color onto his palette, and smoosh it around with a little of this and a dab of that. As he lifts the brush up, I almost always think, “Now, where the heck are you going with that, Mister?! There’s no crying in baseball, and there’s no electric blue in a landscape!”

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Doink.

And all of a sudden, there’s a new freshness or relief or believability or something that hadn’t been there the moment before.

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A dribble of honeydew green grows into the top of a tree. A big bold swipe of shark blue… I see the contour of a hill.

And now I think I’m starting to understand how this seeing/tricking thing is done.

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It’s magic.

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