Vacation Brain

Thursday night was the first night in the current set of painting classes with Kat Corrigan. It’s been somewhere between 1 to 1 1/2 years since I’ve taken her class. Class was full with 7 other participants. One of the them was also a repeater and I really enjoyed what she said in class. She mentioned the idea of “vacation brain” as a side effect of her painting practice. Let me say a big YES to that! That’s how I feel and it’s a perfect way to describe it.

Before class started, I should have thought about what my goals(s) would be. Of course, I didn’t, but it came to me after class. I want to work on picking up the “right” amount of paint on the brush and making better paint strokes. The last 6 months or so, I’ve been working on values, value shapes, and mixing colors and that’s helped me improve. At the same time, one of the things that I consistently don’t like are my brush strokes, a problem which is caused by or exacerbated by the paint management on my paint brush.

Mostly, I’ve been ignoring the problem, but I recognize two patterns. The first is pushing down with the brush too hard so more paint ends up in the sponge of the palette than on the paint brush. I’ve been trying not do this, but haven’t figured out what to do instead. The second is picking up too much paint on my brush, so that it’s goopy. Sometimes I achieve the middle ground, but not often.

During Kat’s painting demo, I really watched how she mixes and picks up paint with her brush. During painting time in class, I tried to pick up paint in the same way and really tried to not have dry, scratchy little paint strokes or overly goopy ones. It felt good to focus on this part of the process and not worry so much about the outcome. That is another goal. I don’t want to get hung up on painting something that I think is good or that I like. Instead, I hope to relax into the process in order to lean and experiment and let go of the outcome.

I forgot to take a picture of my painting during class and we left them in the studio until next week. As a substitute, here is a quick value drawing of an apple, which was also done during the first class.