My painting story began properly in early 2020. It seems the 2020 lockdown was the spur for a lot of people to reassess their life choices and maybe start down a more creative path, but that wasn't really the case for me. In fact, lockdown made my situation worse, because the line between work and home was blurred, and many a time I found myself working into the evening because I could, and felt I should.
So I like to think the new found interest in painting was going to happen anyway, regardless of outside events. It was my wife’s 50th birthday in May of that year. Her father had passed away the year before, and stuck for something special to give her, I thought I’d have a go at doing an oil painting of her dad. So, I found a suitable photo, secreted myself away in the study over the course of many nights and fashioned an oil painting on a bit of canvas from a canvas pad. It turned out better than I had expected:
I should point out here that I would be a liar if I said it was the first time I had ever picked up a paintbrush. From an early age, I wanted to draw and paint, but it was always a struggle (because learning a skill is always a struggle), and as I grew older, somehow I managed to convince myself that I could never be what I wanted to be. The reasons why are complicated, but let’s just say it was at least partly down to an unhappy home life, and if I may, an education system that wasn’t really geared to help and guide those that might be reasonably good at art if only they could find the confidence (I will probably rabbit on about this subject more than once in this blog, so apologies in advance). So, I spent my twenties and early thirties drawing occasionally but never thinking much of my efforts. And believing I certainly wasn’t allowed to use the paints I used to stand and gawp at in art shops, longing to be able to buy some and just smear them over a canvas to see what happened.
But age mellowed me a little and I did a few paintings in my early thirties, including this one:
Proud of it though I was, for reasons unknown I still lacked that vital self belief and so more years flew by without very much paint flowing. Only when my father-in-law died did I find a reason to persevere and with that perseverance the blossoming belief that maybe I wasn’t so bad at painting after all. And of course it goes without saying that you enjoy something you’re good at it, so I began to find myself getting lost in painting and maybe even entering that state sometimes called ‘flow’, something I thought I’d never experience not so long ago.
Some, including that reprehensible inner critic will say, ‘bah, that’s not art. You’re just half decent at copying photos.’ And this is entirely true, but I figure we’ve all got to start somewhere. We all need references to paint from, and maybe I’ll come to rely on them less as I progress and my confidence grows. Or maybe not. Only time will tell.
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