not a prodigy

Around this time in 2022, Thanksgiving week if I remember right, I biked over to Blick and got a little Cotman student watercolor palette, and a 6×8 watercolor block, and a couple of brushes — I’d always wanted to learn to paint.

After a couple of frustrated months, it occurred to me that I didn’t have to invent painting, and I did the sensible thing, I got on YouTube.

And then I got Covid, and that really made all the difference.

I’ve entered and exited many stints of drawing and painting since I was a child, and I had a certain amount of natural talent, but I’ve always plateaued and exhausted myself and gone back to writing. This time I was armed with experience: In 2020 and 2021 I’d learned the ukulele, I’d learned to bake, I’d learned to quilt. I was obsessed with learning new things.

I’d been under the impression, I think because of all the stories about prodigies they unhelpfully taught us in school, that you had to be born knowing how to do something to ever be any good at it.

Reader, you don’t.

After a week in bed, too tired to do much other than watch videos of a lovely and talented British man who pointed one camera at his canvas and one at his palette and explained everything he did and why, I tried again.

And you know what? I was not suddenly a great painter, but I could kind of paint. And it was thrilling, it still is. I wish someone had told me, when I was a kid and deciding who I wanted to be, that you could just work really hard at something you were terrible at and move the needle. Maybe they did but I just wouldn’t listen. Anyway, now I know.

I started this blog for a couple of reasons. For one, I want to learn to draw. I mean, I can kind of draw, but I want to really learn to draw. And maybe it’s better not to do these things alone.

Follow along for ink drawings of photos taken on my Light III, some likely more intelligible than others. For example, the second panel from this week’s installment of adventures is a high angle of my cherry tree’s lower branches and trunk against the snow. No one has been able to see it. But I can see it, and anyway I’m still learning.

If there’s one thing I know how to do it’s start again.