It’s Only a Layer! Bringing Play Back to Your Art Practice.
I stumbled onto this art book at my local library a few years back, Expressive Flower Painting by Lynn Whipple. I loved the book so much that I never forgot about it and finally bought the book this last summer. I am in a period of my life where I want to paint bigger and bolder, but it can be scary to go all in on a big canvas with the fear that the painting won’t turn out great, and you just dumped a $100+ of paint and canvas down the drain.
Lynn helps us move through this fear into a more fun and joyous way to paint. Her first chapter is called Permission to Play. Some of her tips are:
Try using two hands at once to warm up
Paint and dance to upbeat music.
Remember “it’s only a layer”
She encourages playing with mixed media and surrounding ourselves with heaps of fresh flowers.
My favorite chapter of the book is where Lynn guides us through a multi-layer process of how to create a big, expressive flower painting. She has us drawing a floral composition in charcoal with two hands, wiping it out, then spinning the canvas around 90 degrees to draw another composition to again wipe out. We do these spin drawings multiple times throughout this entire process, which keeps us from getting too precious about our initial compositions. It’s very loose and freeing!.
I revisited her many layers method this summer to move past my block of painting some local wildflowers that I had struggled to paint “well” in the past. And it turned out great! Although, I liked the layer a few layers back a little better than the finished painting.
I can get too serious about my artwork and hung-up on precision and comparison, and that can suck the joy out of painting and make it feel more like a chore than a nourishing spiritual practice. I was recently in an intuitive drawing class where my instructor asked us to think about the experience of drawing itself, the soft charcoal in our hand, the sound of the marks we make on the newsprint, the smell of the coffee brewing in the studio. She told us not to get so hung up on getting the likeness of the figure, but to simply enjoy the feeling of creating.
Thank you to my art instructor and to Ms. Lynn Whipple for getting me out of my head and into my body for a more playful, joyous art practice.
