Surrender to the mess

All those clean, fresh starts had made me forget what it was like, until now, to be messy and honest and out of control. To be real.

Sarah Dessen

Right, so here we are... after two painting sessions and two layers, these are the hot messes that I've created. Layer one, designed to just break-in the white canvas, created with a mixture of dribble and smoosh techniques (technical terms those!) using only warm colours. Layer two - an exercise where we were encouraged to play with our tools, familiarise ourselves with the way the paint moves and make as many and as varied a collection of marks as we could, scrubbing, twirling, dabbing, dragging, stamping, etching... keeping the flow moving, not stepping back to worry about what it looked like overall, not over-thinking, remaining unattached to the outcome and immersed in the process.... Many of these requests harder for me to do than one might expect. The need to "fix" after I stepped back by just whiting it all out with gesso and starting again was the hardest to resist but, in the morning, when I looked at them again, I was so glad that I hadn't. I'm just going to trust it, surrender to the mess and see how it evolves.

I added layer two to my canvases after a particularly horrible day and one of the most dehumanising visa application experiences ever (and believe me, I've had some - I could write an entire book of ways that these places manage to turn it into a torturous art form). I was feeling frustrated, tightly wound and tearful. I thought that I'd probably wait until the next day to catch up on my lesson but when I got in, I changed into comfies, made a cup of tea, grabbed a handful of nuts, turned on some music and gave it a whirl. I can honestly say I've never enjoyed painting more and liked the results less.

There are small bits of each canvas that I love though. Bits that would not have happened if I hadn't given over to the process. Things I would not have discovered about how I love to move paint around with my fingers and about how I like working with those funny little foam brushes and how it gets easier to do when you play the right music and stick with it through the resistant parts. I still look forward to the point when we're encouraged to blend and harmonise composition a bit more and add more light and dark contrast... I'm very pleased there are about 16 layers still to come and most of this will probably be covered up but oh, what a release it provided and how much better I felt afterwards. All that anxiety and anger was just gone: sublimated into painting joy.

I think there's a profound lesson in here somewhere, and it's about more than just painting.