Intuitive Watercolor

I picked up watercolor painting while my partner was touring with an orchestra this past spring. I didn't need something to occupy my time, but rather took it as an opportunity to explore something new-ish without distraction.

There was a moment in college where I dabbled in the medium around significant imagery, and a core toddler-hood memory is painting with a water-wet brush from little printed wells on a special coloring book page. None of it portfolio-worthy.

I've eventually come to realize that I'm absolute shit as rendering things from real life into realistic creative expressions. Abhorrently bad, likely from a combination of skill gaps and an imagination that, while suitably expansive (I think?), does not give much more weight to visualizations than shadows on a cave wall and misty, temporary vignettes.

Even attempting to paint specific abstract forms I manage to envision often results in disappointment. Practice makes perfect, sure, but I am also impatient with myself and prone to abandoning new hobbies at which I'm not immediately an expert.

So, heaven bless my discovery of what's generously called "intuitive watercolor."

For the children of the Nineties who grew up visiting houses with colorful oils and gels creating relaxing little desk toppers for adults, who grew up to be teenagers staring at the whorls incense smoke makes in variable air patterns, this new approach to visual stimulation (indeed, stimming) is an entirely familiar practice.

Pools of water on paper become colorful blooms, dependent on the properties of the paint and the conditions of the brush. A lazy drag of a particularly rich hue across lightly textured paper becomes a delicate ombre. Colors combine or refuse to do so. One can mix their own hitherto unknown palette with a series of swipes. Incredible.

And it doesn't have to look like anything. The art is in the practice.

Of course, some of the exceptionally skilled creators of YouTube and Pinterest birth forth masterpieces of splotchy messes turned into nuanced forms that look how your insides feel in all the best ways, or enhance their dried efforts with ink and acrylic pens to make tribal-looking markings or true-enough-to-life depictions of real physical objects. Absolutely magical.

I'm not there yet. I'm not much more advanced than the artistic genius toddler I almost certainly was convinced I was. But I think I've maintained the wonder that I held then, at making a dry thing wet and colorful, and making that wet and colorful thing become a pretty picture.

It's only now in my advancing age that I fully grasp that I am not a genius, and it's in encouraging silly arty babies (that is to say, in a lot of cases, perfectly capable adults) that the real joy lives.

This intuitive watercolor practice is entirely for me, though, not something to share or submit or sell. I've never been good about receiving critical feedback on my own artistic productions, and don't care enough about being "good" to expose my work to much scrutiny. Beyond the bounds of this blog and the random social post, of course.

I've got enough worrying to do about being good enough at my day job and in my relationships. My incoherent splotches and forms are always waiting for when I can tear myself away from those obligations, treasured though they tend to be.

To be very sentimental, I'm grateful to my mom for creating that core toddler memory. As a grownup in need of constant and consistent coping, I'm finding that everything that made me happy when I was little is what's saving me now.

What a journey.