Scumbling toward ecstasy (Week 12)

"A thing of beauty is a joy forever. Its loveliness increases. It will never pass into nothingness."

Was John Keats talking about art? A pretty face? A stirring sonata? For the sake of this week's post, let's go with art.

I am not artistic. I'm so unartistic, in fact, that I once had a freelance business called Robb J Can't Draw. So I approached this week with the appropriate amount of fear and healthy amount of respect. My goal was to product a work of "art" within 7 days, under the watchful eye of my artist wife. 

Val supplied me with the art board, a collection of paints and brushes, and a lot of advice. My job was to fill in the rest with a subject and some brushstrokes. Here's how it went.

I'd recently seen a picture of a grain elevator being demolished in Mortlach, Saskatchewan. As a transplanted prairie dog, that image moved me. Those "things of beauty" are fast disappearing on the prairie landscape, and I find that sad. It seemed especially poignant in the case of Mortlach, a village just off Highway 1 whose name basically means "dead lake."

On Day One, I dug up an image from YouTube of the elevator coming down in a cloud of dust. Val told me I would need to do some "scumbling" to translate that to the art board. It was a word I had never met before. I now know it means to paint in a way that the layers beneath appear, and it's a technique used by countless artists to create perfect clouds. I'd have to give it a go to capture that moment when the doomed elevator breaks free of its moorings and begins its inevitable descent to the ground. But like John Keats hinted at, it will never "pass into nothingness."

All that aside, I found painting wonderfully stimulating. I couldn't wait to get home each night and add the next element. It started with some sky-and-earth gradients, as I slowly got the hang of mixing different colours using a palette Val fashioned for me out of tin foil and a cutting board.

Even though I knew I could always go over and redo bits I screwed up on, I was still pretty terrified about getting something wrong. I guess one of the keys to this art thing is allowing yourself to fail, and then covering up your mistakes. Good thing I wasn't working in watercolour. Val tells me it's not so possible with that; I'd just end up throwing a lot of my attempts in the bin.

Gotta say, I feel pretty pleased with the end result. It's not going to hang on a wall, just be around as a reminder that all things are possible, despite what my business card once proclaimed.

I call the painting "Collapse" which is meant to be a somewhat clunky metaphor about a disappearing way of life in places like Mortlach. But is it art? I dunno. Eye of the beholder and all that.

NEXT WEEK: After-dinner walk every night!