The Fears of Watercolor Painting

In the digital age, picking up a paint brush and loading it with pigments and water to apply to paper can send mental shivers down many a spine. Why? When we engage a crafting process, the act of making something from raw materials, we leave the world of stored images, mouses, and clip art behind. We are asked to become an integral part of the painting and crafting process: interacting with gravity and evaporation; making mistakes; taking chances; and not knowing the exact outcome. We actually confront the many faces of fear: fear of success, of failure, of comparision, of the search for perfection, and the sidetracking of preciousness. They are all real, most of us have variations of the above and, to paraphrase American impressionist Frank Webb: Fear is a natural ingredient in creativity, recognize it and work through it.

Some of the best ways to deal with these fears from my teaching experiences and art work are the following:

1. avoid "circling the wagons": find a place to set up your painting materials so that they are immediately accessible. When i first began painting, I spent at least 30 minutes "setting up", then fell prey to my unnamed fears and said "okay, time to cook supper, will try again tomorrow". Hah avoidance.
2. try to release any sense of preciousness to your work, that is, engage in the painting as play, or play-work as I like to call it, not some serious masterpiece endeavor...let it go, play with a lot of energy and dont worry about the outcome.
3. look at "goofs", "failures" as experiments and explorations. As long as there is good energy in the painting, there can be no failure, only efforts or experiments that teach something. Okay that did not work, why and let me try again.
4. and if in doubt or stuck, just paint anything, slosh the paint around on the paper and have fun; move in any direction and just move!
5. finally, for this installment, no more than two glasses of wine or you will really wonder the next day who was tampering with your paintings!

Keep painting and have a great day. Some basic techniques in the next blog. Ron Kasprisin