What if you could possess a color? Own it, understand it, live with it through the moods and vagaries of light and paper? It’s been about three and a half years I’ve been painting with watercolors. The very first time I tried, the book instructed me to mix the blues and yellows in proportion. I squeezed out from a tube blue and yellow in the approximate proportions. It took me the better part of two tubes before I gave up and called it good enough. It seemed like a pity to throw away the rest, but what could you do?
Yeah, for those who don’t know like me? You can “resurrect” watercolor indefinitely by adding um, water. And when they recommend you mix it, they’re talking about the released watery watercolor you would paint with. A tiny dab of watercolor in a palette can last you months and many paintings.
Good thing it was the cheap student watercolors.
When I loaded up my palette yesterday, with a number of new colors, the watercolors were not the cheap ones. I try to tell myself that the hobby is inexpensive by comparison to, say, golf. Or bass fishing. But the contents of my paintbox are truly a treasure. Loading a palette is a labor of love – equal parts tedious and delightful. My left hand got sore from the threaded tops of the tubes, stuck on by paint. There was the planning and the labeling and the decision making … can I live without Bordeaux? Which yellows will I want for the desert? But the best part of all is the swatching, where you dip a tip of your brush into the thick virgin paint and then release it with water onto the paper. Will it be creamy? Transparent? Will it granulate? Will the color of the paint and the color of the watered paint be the same or wildly different? Will the water reveal one pure color, or a prism of many? And most critically – did you guess right about the variety and value and hue in your ordering of the swatch?
In light, I love all colors. Perhaps green most, since it’s the garment of my beloved nature in the places I have lived. But in paint, my heart belongs to indigo. Students of history know how important indigo was to the commerce of the colonized Caribbean. Blue pigment was always a problem in the history of paints. There’s the fantastically expensive lapis lazuli pigments. There’s the ecology destroying but fugitive woad of the Picts. Blues are hard to find. And indigo is not just blue, it’s exceptional. The indigo paint is so creamy and consistent, versatile, kind, assertive, trustworthy. When I have indigo on my brush, I have no fear. If I were limited to one paint for the rest of my life, it would be indigo. I remember the first time I tried to use Cerulean blue. It’s a pretty blue – like a robin egg or a spring sky. But it came across my page chalky, inconsistent. I thought it must be a defective batch but no. Granulating is the technical term. A wash with it is like rolling the dice on paint coverage. Per instructions, I loaded Cerulean into my palette, but we will never be on dear terms, Cerulean and me.
The last year or two I’ve been reading my way through the histories of pigments and paints. My palette covers a hundred thousand years. I have the yellow ochre that neolithic priests painted in flickering firelight on deep cavern walls in the airless belly of the earth. I have the Venetian Red that colored so many lions and trousers and buildings in medieval and renaissance paintings. I do NOT have mummy brown, alas, since we no longer find the best use of mummies to be loading them onto our paint brushes (or burning them as fuel for locomotives). But I also have a whole palette of the unspellable quinacridones: gold, coral, magenta, rose, red, violet. Those paints “break” in this astonishing way where the thick paint and the watered paint are entirely different colors. The poisonous arsenic has been removed from the greens, and replaced with the perylene and the pthalos. What color does not come in cadmium? All these minerals and chemicals and discoveries (the history of mauve is a real page-turner – Wikipedia doesn’t do it justice) come with their own characteristics and traits – the personalities of the paint. Some of my paints I hardly ever use (Potters Pink, Terra Verte) but love for their connection to the earth and artists before me.
I have put together a number of palettes in my short history of painting: for a particular book, for a particular season, as I learn which ones I love and those with whom I will maintain a polite distance. But this palette has an entirely different slant than my White Mountain or Northwest art. I need the yellows, the purples, the red earths, the subdued depth of the desert greens to capture Arizona.
I can hear the confusion now … Arizona? Do you not live in New England in January (which, btw, is mostly a hundred variations on blue and blacks palette wise). Well. Here’s how it is. I’m switching functions at work from one to another, and it was taking a while and I didn’t have all that much to do while we made the switch. And it was a quiet week on the ol’ calendar. And last weekend I started looking at watercolor retreats I might be able to do this winter/spring, since with graduation etc. we are not likely to travel as much as a family this year. And the best one that didn’t conflict with anything was … this week. I feel wildly impulsive and out of character! Who flies to Arizona at the last minute? Surely this is irresponsible of me. But yet, here I am.
I’ve never been to Arizona (well, I may have driven through when I was 13 but that really doesn’t count). I’ve never seen a saguaro. I’ve spent far too little time in the desert of any ilk. I do not object to 80 degree instead of 18 degree weather. But in two hours I’ll land in Phoenix and wend my way to Tucson, for this workshop. I brought my hiking shoes (and yes, extra water bottles) in the hopes of hitting Saguaro National Park on the way. I have no idea what to expect: I haven’t done something like this before.
But that’s really more than half the point. In these middle chapters of life, we face the choice on whether to invest and focus on continuing to grow and change and learn new things – or whether to hone our existing expertise and enjoy the mastery we have worked for our entire lives. Of course, it’s a nuanced choice: we all have to figure out how to use the new way to watch movies, and every skill we once had comes on the journey with us. I find myself hungry for curiosity, and enthralled by the worlds out there I never knew existed. Who knew that paints had such personality and history? A child of the magenta/cyan/yellow screens would never guess such a truth. What other wonders await out there, just asking for me to ask the right set of questions to unlock them? I’m itching to find out. And see a few new sights in the process.
Edited to add:
I wrote that on the plane. Then I got here, spent an annoying amount of time in the airport and drove down I10 to Tucson feeling depressed at the nature of the billboards (casinos and personal injury lawyers mostly). But Saguaro National Park made up for all of it. The watercolors start tomorrow!
My Truant Pen 