As a five-year-old, I loved fairies, Spice Girls and Vincent van Gogh. It wasn’t the famous ear incident or the existential despair that I found fascinating, but a picture book. For the Love of Vincent, by Brenda V Northeast, told the story of Van Gogh’s life but with one minor change: Vincent was a teddy bear, not a depressed Dutchman. It was this book that lead me to the real Van Gogh and to his art, which was vibrant and alive and made complete sense to a small child who mainly painted with her fingers. I loved Vincent, man and bear; I even went as Vincent Van Bear to Book Week, and confused the hell out of everyone.
I was a happy painter for years, until I reached high school and I started getting marked for it. When art went from something I simply did to something I could be judged for, that made it terrifying. And as I learned more about artists like Vincent (man, not bear), I began to suspect that an artist’s life was for other people, who seemed to experience life a lot more vibrantly than I did, good and bad. Taking solace in the fact that I would never have been exceptional made it easier to just stop.
But when I began writing about art for a living, I felt the itch to paint again – specifically oil paints, which I’d never used but always felt carried a certain prestige. I wanted to learn how to paint, but I also wanted to learn how to be fine with possibly being bad at something – but do it anyway.
I enrolled in an oil painting class and committed to spending four hours each Sunday in front of an easel. I went back to basics: I learned about colour theory, composition, drawing, and paint mixing. The latter was crucial – one by one, we’d only get the thumbs up to start painting once our teacher judged we had mixed our palette correctly. As weeks went on, we moved through different forms: abstraction, landscape and portraiture. We learned by copying: one week we would paint a colour John Singer Sargent portrait, but entirely in black and white; another we recreated Anders Zorn’s portrait of Martha Dana in order to mix “a Zorn palette” (just four colours, popular for its simplicity and usefulness for portraits). All of it was fascinating. All of it was hard.
The hardest lesson of all was to find pleasure in struggle. I wasn’t immediately good at oil painting. One week I spent three miserable hours trying to paint a satin ribbon curled on a table, and went home in a filthy mood. I was angry for not being effortlessly great at something difficult and I was angry at myself for being angry about it. But when I collected my painting a week later, I realised two bolstering things: my ribbon was actually OK for a first go, and I had learned something. Mainly that I hate painting fabric, but also that I could do it and I would only get better at it from there.
Weeks later I was tasked with painting a white sheet against a white background and I learned something else: teachers are mean.
Finishing the 12-week course has given me enough confidence to paint without aim or supervision. Each week I’d come home from class with the previous week’s efforts and stick it on the fridge. It was just a silly gesture, a nod to what five-year-old me would have done. But the fridge has also become a test for me, my little gallery wall. Visitors spot my paintings and ask about them, and I have gradually learned to not cringe when they do. It’s character building, I think. Vincent would be proud.