Charles Hawthorne, an American painter, who founded the Cape Cod School of Art at the turn of the last century, said, when teaching painting, “Color first…house second.”  He is reminding us that in the process of painting, it behooves us first to get lost in those visual elements that excite us – color for example. For Hawthorne, the painting process is not about making pictures of such things such as houses. It is about feeling the sensuality, the energy of such things as color – not just first, but first and foremost.

This realization of profound feelings as we paint – as we work – is what is meaningful about the activity of painting.  What is alive and meaningful is never the thing referred to – the house. That is just a prompt. What is alive and meaningful is the rush, the realization of our powers in the moment of creation. That’s the payoff.

Turning that corner – feeling the color as opposed to painting a picture of the house, was, for me, something that took quite a long time. I really had to think a lot about it, wrestle with it, get clear as to where I was going wrong. Simply stated, I was on the wrong track. So are many of my students. Try as they might to feel the color (and thus to see it – and see it twinkling, changing), they will instead make a house or a tree or a boat. Correct, but dead. Why is something seemingly so simple, so difficult?

We can get a clue from kids. Kids are much more likely to see color and not the house. Often in kid paintings, red houses are often just a lot of scribbled red. No house at all. They are already there, brimming with wonder, sensation. Feeling their powers. Alive. I was there once too. We all were already there. But a funny thing happens on the way to becoming a “success” in the “real world.” Somewhere along the way I, and I suspect you too, learned – and believed – that work itself is pain and toil. This should come as no surprise. It is part of our institutional inheritance. Adam Smith (an architect of our economy), to cite just one example, defined labor as a “disutility;” that is (according to the Oxford Definition of Economics) “the psychological cost of work or other unpleasant experiences [emphasis added].” Kids know zip about this sort of thing. Often, they are wonderfully uneducated and free – at least until about the second grade.

And so concepts like “blue Mondays” and “thank God it’s Friday” become pervasive and uncontested. “Happy hour” comes after work. A triumph highly coveted is the triumph of early retirement, is it not? All these elements of our shared understandings convey a belief that if we are good at anything, if we are worth anything, the worth and value will show up in the results, the product. And we know when we have measured up, when we have “succeeded.” It is when an external authority – some boss, manager, supervisor, expert, director, owner, committee – says so. So, in effect, the external authorities of our lives are constantly whispering to us in a thousand ways: your worth, your value is the worth and value of what you produce. Look for results, baby.

So it goes.

“Color first – house second” is not just helpful advice or a technique or a way to make paintings. It is a dagger in the heart of whom we have become, a challenge to an entire way of life. Painting, as a creative process, as Hawthorne and so many other artists are suggesting, is not about making the successful picture – whatever that might be. Painting is about the excitement of feeling larger and more powerful. It’s about growing and becoming more.

The house? Do as my teacher would endlessly urge. “Get it through the color.”