“When I was young I painted the trees and the clouds just as I saw them.

As I grew older and learned something about art, I realized that I couldn’t paint the trees

and clouds as I saw them, and so I painted them differently.

And when I became much older, and looked back on a lifetime

of painting trees and clouds,

I realized that I had always painted the trees and clouds as I saw them.” 

 

-variation on a traditional Buddhist saying

excerpted from Landscape Painting by Mitchell Albala

 

 

It’s called the underpainting; that first layer of paint that helps determine the placement of light and dark, and often the outline of what is to come. Some artists brush varying tones of bright magenta, gold, deep indigo, all colours that may never be seen again, yet still inform the final result.

Like writing, where, as we learned in school, one creates an outline with one’s salient bullet points firing toward the final declaration.

Or constructing a building, where we use blueprints, plans and instructions all culminating, if followed correctly, in a sturdy structure.

Whether painting, writing or building, one is following a plan.

Unless, of course, you operate like me.

Then you just stumble around in the dark. Because, darlings, clearly, I have no plan.

I have never crafted an outline for any article, essay or post. Instead, like I’m doing now…I simply begin. I write to find what I think.

I am hardly the first writer to say that, but it is the truth.

That is not to say I don’t have a vague idea of what I hope to discover; to flesh out an idea that has been noodling around in the back of my brain.

But to have a map plotted out with how to convey and articulate that thought? Not so much.

Likewise with painting or making a collage or the molten process of making an encaustic…it really would be lovely to know what the hell I was doing.

I simply start and immediately find myself in completely unknown territory. Sometimes I start with a line across the horizon and think, oh, a landscape.  But that might be the only thought and it’s hardly very detailed or particularly helpful. Instead, with each stroke of the brush or torch on the wax, I see no path out of the mess I am making. I can only keep going and hope that each spot I try to resolve will eventually add up to something I can live with.

Like when I’m writing, I edit and cut and add until I feel like I’ve arrived at a new place.  A place, I might add, that I didn’t really know I was heading toward at all.

You know, of course, where I’m going with this.  We are talking about something other than painting and building and writing aren’t we?

Yep, once again I’m heading to the inevitable metaphor, because, as we know, EVERYTHING is a metaphor.

 

 

 

“It’s so fine and yet so terrible to stand in front of a blank canvas.”

– Paul Cézanne

 

We, you and I, are the ultimate works in progress.

Every time we tell another favourite anecdote, relate a day’s event, we are editing how we want to see ourselves and how we want to be seen.

If we look closely, we discover that our stories tend to have themes: Are we the hero? The unwitting victim? The innocent one?

But beneath what we are willing to show to others, there is the underpainting, the dark messes, the stories that end up on the cutting room floor.  These are the chapters perhaps only known by those oldest and closest to us. Whether or not these bits are ever shared, they still inform the present.

Then there are the messy mistakes and darker thoughts that no one knows, but these too, add shadows and nuance to the whole.  You don’t need to see all that I’ve edited out of this post in order for those deleted words to still inform the piece.

Nor do you have to know the slashing and cutting that is hidden beneath the veneer of my final painting, because all of it is still there, vibrating beneath the seen surface.

 

 

 

Different friends know different aspects of who we are. There are the friends who have been with me in the darkest rooms of grief and the ones who have only known me as the funny one.  There is the friend that explores spirituality, and the one who, because of his similar background, completely understands when I speak of my childhood terror of the rapture.

Everything we’ve been, and currently are, is part of the whole.

I’ve thought about this in the context of our move here to Kimberley. Except for one couple, everyone we know here is a new friend or acquaintance. I know very little of their particular backstories, nor they of mine, but they certainly don’t need to know each story from my childhood to relate to me now.

Those particular chapters from the past are reserved for times spent with older friends, the ones who know exactly what I’m talking about, where I don’t need to provide any context or a background sketch to render the story more visible.

We are complex creatures and, like a final painting, most never see what lies beneath our shiny surface. And that’s okay, not everything about us needs to be known, not even to ourselves.

Instead, our shimmering and complex beauty lies with all that is revealed, but, just as importantly, all that is not.

Shine on friends.

 

 

 

“I have always tried to hide my efforts and wished my works

to have the light and joyousness of springtime which never

lets anyone suspect the labors it has cost.”

– Henri Matisse