I often envy non-plein air painters and then again I don’t. At times I wish I could stay in the studio, close the doors, put on beat-up comfortable clothes and paint without distraction. No dragging my easel and supplies out to wherever. No being on the spot. No being so vulnerable. And yet, a thousand times over, I end up choosing to paint outside, in the midst of the activity of a community and of course in the midst of the air, vibrating colors, wind, smell, sounds that cohere and somehow draw me into an another dimension. Let’s just call it a rush. It’s the reason why I paint. I really don’t think about the results of the painting as I do it. The canvas is a kind of magical surface that when I mark with a brush, I am propelled into this other dimension.

Lest I sound like a loony bird, take a look at the much heralded right brain pathway that neuroanatomist Jill Bolte Taylor (whom I referenced in our last newsletter) has described and others have identified as part of the creative experience:

Our right hemisphere is all about this present moment. It’s all about right here right now….it thinks in pictures and it learns kinesthetically through the movement of our bodies. Information in the form of energy streams in simultaneously through all of our sensory systems. And then it explodes into this enormous collage of what this present moment looks like. What this present moment smells like and tastes like, what it feels like and what it sounds like. I am an energy being connected to the energy all around me…in this moment we are perfect. We are whole. And we are beautiful.

Hoping, thus, that my credibility has been enhanced, let me explain more about the rush dimension, as it were, that painting delivers to me. It is in this space I become more, I grow, I feel larger, and, most importantly, I am able to see and feel more deeply. But here’s the problem: the rush isn’t easily accessible. I may go out 5 times and only access it once or twice. Or there may be just moments, a few minutes here and there, where I feel I’m in that “zone.” And is very often the case, the feeling of having a deeper experience seems to slip away much like those nice dreams that we try to re-enter upon awakening.

The photo above is of a painting (that measures 4 feet by 2 feet) that failed largely because I could not sustain the dream-like feelings that had brought me to the point to when the photo was taken (just after my second time out or after about 3 hours work). During that second time out, I felt as though I was lost in a good way or maybe I should say captured by the totality of the plein-air experience. To the non-painters among you, it means that the color/space/atmosphere was practically drug-like. The boats and trees were no longer boats and trees. Instead they were just color, melting, moving, vibrating, and lush. I felt alive, happy, joyful, intense, visually articulate and wanting to converse, wanting to be touched by the swirling rose and yellow and green energy around me, all in a sea of innocence, wonder, pleasure, and enchantment.

When I got back to my studio and put the painting down and stepped back, I gave myself permission to assess the thing critically because I was no longer in the process. I said to myself, “Yes, it’s working. All those feelings come back to me. It’s alive.” The drawing seemed off balanced. But no matter, I wanted to give it another shot. I wanted to push the thing forward, to make it express, somehow, more vitality and more mystery. But (and this is a big “but”) pushing it meant that I would have to find an experience that was actually richer and deeper in some way than the experience that had brought me to where the painting was at that point.

Allow me to articulate this thought carefully: pushing in this sense means to push oneself further, to strain or reach further. Feeling and seeing more richly, however, does not come about by simply looking more intently. The particularity of any given feeling, when I paint, arises out of an expression of who I am in the moment that I am making choices. A writer may choose one word or a series of words from a vocabulary of 100,000 separate words, for example. In my case, as a painter, I must choose a very specific color and a way of applying the color, also from thousands of possibilities. That is how I express myself as a painter. I must act, I must choose. My choices will differ from someone else’s. That is why a painting will be called, if it is sincere, a Monet or a Renoir or a Smith, Jones, or Fresia.

Notice how the process unfolds. The brush stroke may begin out of something shadowy and inchoate within me in that I have a sense of what I want to do, but it is unclear really: some alizarin, with some white and a little bit of cobalt blue and I want to use a broad long stroke, let us say, to express that set of inchoate feelings. But in that very moment when my choices are made manifest on the canvas, in the very moment of making the mark, the feeling is clarified and made real. This is what is meant when Cézanne or Monet said – and they said it often – that they were struggling to realize (to make real) particular inchoate feelings as they paint.[1] I become determinant in a particular way precisely because (in any given moment) I choose a color or line or whatever, make the mark and – swoosh – realize a feeling that in turn permits me to see just a little bit more.[2]  In order to push the thing forward, then, I would have to realize deeper feelings by making strokes that themselves would have to be part of that realization. Or to put it another way, I would have to grow that much more in order to get to that new place of seeing and feeling.

At my designated time to go out again, however, it was cloudy for several days. Then it rained. Finally, when the sun had returned, I went back out. But the humidity was gone. The air was crisp and dry. Everything was a slightly different color: the visual whole was just something altogether different. Not hugely different but enough. It was like buying that great bottle of wine only to find that it wasn’t the same, it disappointed. Or, it was like seeing a friend, who for some reason is distracted, and the evening falls flat. I simply wasn’t moved.

So I was confronted with a problem. Do I paint and try to catch a new rush? Or should I wait for that magical day to return with exactly the right weather and colors? Experience told me not to wait but to move forward with the new day, to find something else that felt magical and to weave it into what was already there.[3] Bad decision. My friend wasn’t the same. The wine was sour. Whatever life had existed in the painting seemed to get buried beneath a layer of uninspired miserable strokes of paint.

So what can we take away from this experience? Maybe the most important lesson is that the activity of painting has more to do with growing a tiny bit than it does with making a picture. Pushing ourselves and feeling that extra new bit of power (the enhanced ability to see) explains the thrill. Some of you may be thinking, what if I tried to fix the painting or go back to the studio and resurrect the old one somehow? Sure, I could have done that, but that approach turns on an entirely different understanding of what it means to paint. That would be the picture maker for whom the pay off comes from an external measure, “the result” or “the sale” or “the approval by another.” Contrast this approach to the one I’m outlining here where the payoff is in becoming more complete by virtue of one’s expressive choices and where the pay off is always in the moment of creativity.

That’s what was nice about that failure. For a few hours I was becoming more able. I was becoming more me. There is no painting to show for it, now. Just the photo of something that was what it was at a particular moment in time.

Perhaps it wasn’t a failure after all.