A SEMI-BIOGRAPHICAL ACCOUNT OF MY PAINTING EFFORTS
ON BECOMING
PICASSO
“And a can of hair spray,” I
tell the girl with the earphones dangling from her earlobes.
“It’s for my art
class," I add.
The queue in the shop is building up behind me, but I explain
anyway. “To keep the pastels from running into one another.”
The minute I get home I soak
my morning’s effort in a blast of hair spray and stick it on the fridge door. I
have already spent a fortune on my Thursday art class and the feedback
so far has been a series of warm condolences.
“It’s not bad,” my youngest
son reassures me.
“You have to start
somewhere,” declares my eldest as she turns my masterpiece upside down in an
attempt to decipher it.
“It is a beginner’s class, love,” says my
husband. “You can’t expect to be a Picasso just yet!”
But that’s just the problem.
It isn’t a beginner’s class.
The beginner’s class was full.
“Of course, as I’ve said
before, there’s no such thing as white,” announces Vivienne Lensky on our first
morning. “White does not exist. If you look with a painterly eye you’ll see
that white is actually informed by some other colour, like blue or yellow.”
The other six painterly
ladies nod knowingly.
This isn’t their first outing in art class.
They’ve been
juggling it with golf, bridge and church coffee mornings for well near a
decade. Janet has already progressed to watercolours and spends most of the
morning blow drying her elaborately detailed landscape. Josephine has taken up
her vibrantly colourful market scene again, after abandoning it over the summer
months. Perfectly curved and textured melons and peppers stare up at me from
her market stall backdrop.
They are all discussing
framing, art exhibitions, reasonable price tags to place on their term’s work etc
etc while I am set to the task of choosing my favourite pictures from a pile of
gallery brochures. “Just to determine your style,” says Vivienne.
“Pastels,” she announces
after a cursory glance at my choice and I am assigned a box of chalks.
Tears
are beginning to smart. I had expected a palette and an array of exotic
sounding colours to choose from. I had bought a bag of silver tubes and a
selection of brush sizes from 2 to 16. They peep out now from my large canvas
bag, also purchased for its width, depth and capacity to hold the thinners, the
turpentine, the vast stock of supplementary objects that a real painter would
require.
But chalk? I have always hated the smell of it.
Within ten minutes I have
smudges of chalk everywhere. The desk, my pale blue shirt, my nose. Vivienne offers
a rubber which I use generously to rearrange my sleeping cat figure. But it is
all a frantic explosion of dust and smudge. Red has ended up where it was not intended
and my tortoiseshell is more ginger than tortoise.
Meanwhile the other
painterly ladies dabble elegantly and stroll from pale canvas to pale canvas
admiring the view and talking of texture and perspective until the tears
threaten to wash away my morning’s effort.
“I like his pose,” announces
Janet looking over my shoulder.
“It’s a cat is it?” says
Josephine.
“What else,” I mutter through
gritted teeth.
“I think he’s splendid,”
declares Vivienne and I want him for the Christmas card set.”
“The what?” I ask.
“The Christmas card designs.
Every year we do a set of twelve for the Swahili Tiger Widows. Do you think you
could try a snowman next week?”
I have at last found my
level. Three reindeers, four robins, two Santas, three snowmen and one
tortoiseshell later and the Thursday morning Redford Painters have put together
a set of Charity cards. The Tiger Widows declare a bumper year for revenue from
Christmas card sales and I can’t wait until Spring. It seems I am about to
embark on another mission that will require a detailed study of tulips, spring
chickens, lambs and Easter bunnies.
And everybody else is too busy creating
masterpieces.
Copyright with Cathy Leonard 2016
Aaah. I know exactly how you felt. But I bet none of these ladies-who-lunch can write like you do!
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