Watercolor lessons

I've always been into drawing and painting. The first medium I ever learned to use was watercolor. My mom hired an artist to give me and my sister watercolor lessons when I was about 9 or 10. He was a really precise, uber-detailed kind of painter who came to the house once a week. We would move a big desk from my mom's study outside onto the front lawn, where he taught me how to mix colors and manipulate water and brush on paper. 

Over the summer, I produced two obsessively detailed watercolor paintings: a still life with fruit that still hangs in my mom's house, and one of unicorns (another lifelong interest of mine) in a cave. He liked to go over my mom's art books to find "inspiration", and the unicorns' cave resembled Da Vinci's Madonna of the Rocks in quite a few places. 

Since then, though, I've kind of... lost the knack for watercolors. I started getting really impatient if I couldn't finish something in one sitting. There are ways to pull off really quick watercolors, but because that wasn't my tutor's style, I never learned how.

It was a flyer posted on the bulletin board of the Van Beek art supply store on the Weteringschans that led me back to watercolors. Penny Johnson, an artist based in Haarlem, was offering watercolor sessions at her studio. After trading a few emails with Penny, I signed up for the last of the Tuesday afternoon sessions before her summer break.

The city of Haarlem is about 20 minutes by train from Amsterdam. A lot of Marlon's colleagues actually live there because of the lower property costs, which makes it a good alternative to living in Amsterdam. Since I was running late (as usual) for my first lesson, I didn't get to look around much. 

I went back with Marlon the following Saturday to walk around the center and explore a bit more. It seems like a pretty town, a lot smaller and quainter than Amsterdam, with not as many tall buildings and far less tourists (which is nice). Still, I haven't quite decided if it's a city we'd want to live in further down the road.

Penny, a late-middle aged British lady with a brisk and cheery manner, welcomed me warmly with a cup of coffee and my art materials for the day. I immediately felt at home in Penny's studio. It was bright, with high ceilings and enough work space for a small group, with heaps of interesting odds and ends piled together in small vignettes... a charming kind of clutter.

I liked her little collections of ceramics and glass bottles, all ready to be captured by paintbrush and water. I suspect I'll be like this someday. I already have a starter collection of wine bottles on the kitchen counter, which I kept just because I found the colors so pretty.

One wall was covered with cards, posters and various bits of paper showing different styles of watercolor. Some were loose and fast, with luminous colors bleeding together; others were more precise and detailed. These two pieces in particular caught my eye, and I snapped a photo with my iPhone. I would be more than happy if I could learn to paint like this.

Penny, and the two ladies who were here students that afternoon, stopped. "What are you doing?" Penny asked. "Are you taking photographs?" Then they all started talking about picture-happy people, how this tourist on one woman's cruise couldn't stop snap-snap-snapping away, blah blah blah.

I didn't realize that taking photos could be annoying to others. Is it just the generation gap showing here? I didn't want to be one of those "annoying types" so I meekly put away my phone, and resolved not to take my DSLR out of my bag for the rest of the afternoon...

... which was devoted to painting, of course. Penny started me off with a relatively easy project: getting a feel for the wet-on-wet technique, or painting on wet paper.  Wet paper makes the paint (which is also loaded with water) blend and bleed together, so it's for quick, loose work; vastly different from the style of my first tutor, but perhaps more suited for the less deft and more impatient me.

I surprised myself by starting out... cautiously. Timidity is not something I normally expect of myself, but there I was dabbing tentatively at the paper, producing pale, washed-out landscape. Penny took one look at my work and pronounced: "Color, my dear. You need more color. Let's put it this way: the paints are free."

By the end of the two and a half-hour session, I had gained a measure of boldness with my colors and strokes. I was re-learning how to see things differently, to look closer at light versus dark, since with watercolors you start with the lightest colors first, before building up the darker shades. I was beginning to learn how to be patient with mixing colors to achieve just the right shade, and not to settle for what I thought it looked like, out of impatience. And I was remembering how to just... play. All of these things that I thought I'd forgotten were reawakening in me. 

And I have to say: I kind of like it.