Now I know why Van Gough cut off his ear....

For my birthday this year Amy gave me a gift of some art classes at a cute studio RIGHT NEXT DOOR TO MY WORK! I went four weeks for two hours each class. My friend Lynette came with me which made it loads of fun.

This is what I learned:

Week #1: Painting....(well, chalking, we never DID get to use paint - JUST CHALK. And Lynette and I had to share our tin of chalk, but that's okay, there were plenty of each color....) anyway, painting is hard work and takes a bunch of patience. I don't have patience at ALL! Class was two hours long and after about 45 minutes I started thinking, when are we going to rest, or do something different? but it was laying down chalk, laying down chalk, laying down chalk. The teacher gave us minimal instruction, and hilariously, played PAN FLUTE MUSIC IN THE BACKGROUND. Andrew, eat your heart out!  At one point, right about when I was so overwhelmed with musky, arty, angst I blurted out, "I'll pay you ten bucks to change radio station!" I was way out of line. But she did change it, and the feng shui was so much better. But wow, I had to get conditioned to the rigor of it all!

Week #2: Painting can bring out lots of emotions. The second week, we worked on the SAME PICTURE! And I don't even have a picture of the picture any more. It was a stream, flowing out of a mountain. I sent it to you guys on Instragram. I was irrationally and irreverently not in the mood to try to fix my picture any more that second week. I was, actually petulant? I had a mini crisis of faith in myself and that's when I considered cutting off my ear.

Week #3: I took a deep breath, a stepped back, changed my attitude, decided to take things seriously, and realized that learning to draw/paint/chalk takes hours and hours, lo, years and years, and I wasn't as good at this as I thought I'd be, and so I needed to hunker down and take baby steps. I was more focused and serious. Week #3 was a desert scene. You can see depictions below. I don't love desert scenes (I'm no Andrea!). And for some reason, without asking permission, I ended up taking a pen out of my purse and DRAWING with pen and ink on my paper before I did any chalking.

See my cool turtle? And my adorable bunny? and my menacing lizard?

Week #4: We learned about clouds and sky, two of my very favorite things. And I had soooooooo much fun laying down color. As a matter of fact, my mouth was watering at one point it was so much fun. It was worth it just for that moment. And I settled into the two-hour format too. As I was putting down a color, on top of another beautiful color, my mind caught hold of a feeling of "This didn't exist until I made it. And I'm going to lay this turquoise chalk on top of this pale blue and do it so carefully, and consciously, and concretely, that I create an exact space and color that will become real." THAT was a glorious feeling. Oh my gosh it's so hard, and so interesting. I find myself studying the sky and clouds now. I put my sky picture on the fridge- how cute is THAT? (it's the first photo on this blog - such a pretty sunny yellow - there are also parts of the picture not in the photo that blend into blue and red, which are supposed to be sky too, but look vaguely mountainish when I study them).
(p.s. - the teacher really wanted us to sign up for more classes, (of course), but we told her we had to end our careers after four weeks. But hey, she didn't give us back our desert drawings! Glad I took a photo of my turtle!).

XOXO
Happy day before the day before Thanksgiving,
Mama Gough

I took these photos outside of the art studio, coolest clouds EVER!