April 22, 2013
-
Before You Get to 101A
Up until last week I have always used dyes on my gourds. I started out using shoe dyes, but they fade (with or without sun exposure) so I went to a Gourd Show (there are such things, all over the country) and I found the dyes. Love my dyes. Right up until my dyes run, when I’m applying my finish coat, and smear over onto each other. Don’t love that. In the meantime I have been slowly amassing a collection of acrylic paints.
I paint the insides of the gourds with acrylics. Because it’s hardy, durable, easy to apply and it doesn’t run.
To be snobbishly honest, I have always associated acrylic paints with craft projects. (And here we go again with that whole craft vs fine art… Except I don’t belong to the Guild any more and I can paint my gourds any way I want to.
And then I discovered metallic acrylics.
And the fact that all acrylics have a gloss finish, rather than a matt, when you coat them with gloss varnish.
And acrylics don’t bleed.
So I decided to paint a gourd with little crocuses (croci?) all over it. To do this, I needed purple acrylic paint. So I went immediately to the store and stood in the acrylics aisle and studied the paints before me.
I avoid the ones that said ‘craft’. (They’re cheaper. Sometimes not very much cheaper. I have used craft quality acrylics on the INSIDES of my gourds. They worked fine.)
There is a blinding array of acrylic paints available. There is a line of acrylic paints for every budget. (And I have an email subscription to various artist supply stores, where the array is even more blinding.)
So, after much suffering and internal struggle I bought four little jars (and one tube) of acrylics paints home, and added them to my previous collection. And then I thought, I wonder what you do with these?
And I started painting one of my wave gourds.
It looked like a fifth-grader had done it.
Now as it happens I have embraced the idiot-with-a-brush approach to ‘fine art’ because my actual exposure to skills and techniques is pretty much limited to buying how-to books. (Reading them would be a whole different step.) My painting technique is somewhere between the ‘it takes 10,000 hours to get good at anything’ (Gladwin, Gadwin, can’t remember the guy’s name) and ‘I don’t have 10,000 hours of patience, much less practice’. Really. I would like to find something I like to do that I can just sit right down and do well the first time.
However. Not all of those 10,000 hours, I suspect, absolutely have to be yours.
About a year and a half ago my Beloved came up with a wonderful (if slightly dark) plan that involved, in the beginning, my painting a woman’s head on an urn. I have limited skills and the limit is something short of women’s-head- on-urns painting. So I begged and pleaded and got my friend Bingaman to do it. And because she was doing me a personal favor with no immediate reward for doing so, I sat there and watched her do it. I remember several things from watching her. For instance, every now and then she dipped her brush in water. (?) And if she didn’t like what she had, she painted over it.
So after whining to Nancy that my gourd looked like the work of a fifth-grader (which isn’t true, actually; I’ve taught fifth-graders long enough ((three days)) to know they never underpaint: they bury their gourds in paint, then they paint themselves and then each other) I sat down with a glass of water and said to myself, I wonder what this does.
It renders the water undrinkable almost immediately.
It also thins the paint, which allows it to flow more smoothly, which renders are more even paint cover. Imagine that.
Along the same vein I remember watching someone paint something once and every now and again they would smudge it gently with a fingertip.
Tried that.
It wipes off still wet paint that has gone astray.
Anyway. It’s lunch time now. (I know this because Ilah appears in the doorway with her walker and announces, ‘Lunch time’.)
I need to go.
More painting lessons to come. (Yeah, right.)
