Tuesday = Painting = Learning

Every Tuesday morning I have my painting class, and it has become another bright star in my week.  Of course, you probably already know that because I've written about how happy I am that I actually seem to be getting somewhere with it this year.  Since the same thing seems to be happening with my piano lessons, it may be that "third year's the charm" thing.

Whatever it is, I hate to miss a Tuesday of painting if I can help it.  Well, this week I missed.  What with the holidays coming, I had gotten behind in my hand-piecing project.  The sample had to be finished for display by the twentieth of this month so I spent several days stitching all day.  Don't feel sorry for me because I do enjoy it, and it had to be done.  The piece was finished this past Monday, and given our schedules, the only "good" day and time for delivery was Tuesday morning . . . hence, no painting.

However, this story has a good ending.  Sharon, my painting teacher, teaches a class on Thursday night and also offers it as a make up class for those of us who miss our regularly scheduled class.  How's that for luck! 

Anyway, I went last night, and as I painted I thought about how we learn.  Of course, there are many different ways, but I'm going to talk about the power of learning by doing.  Last year Sharon told us a story about when she was a student and was working on a painting of bananas  - dare I say it? - fruitlessly (Ha!) for some time.  She said she just couldn't get the shadows right.  She tried gray.  No good.  She tried brown.  No.  She tried green.  Still didn't look just right.  Then she had an epiphany.  Color complements!  The complement of yellow is violet.  When she tried violet as the shadow, it worked perfectly.  All right.  I know my color theory so I listened to the story and filed it away.

Now, remember the first painting I did this year, the Green Bottle?  At one point I said my shadows weren't quite right?  Of course, at the time I thought I just didn't have the angle right.  Last night I realized that at first I had used gray (from the concrete wall) as my shadow.  However, during class, Sharon suggested that I pull some of the bottle green down into the wall, and I thought, "Oh, okay, and I'll use green as my shadow under the barn siding."  Ta-dah!  It was wonderful, but I didn't make the connection to color theory (green is the complement of red). 

Now I'm working on a painting of an opening in the rock on the cliff walk in Canyon de Chelly so it's all orangey with a cadmium blue sky.  Sharon suggested blue in the shadow of the opening.  I used ultramarine and loved it.  So then - finally - I made the connection.  Light bulbs went on and rockets flared in the night sky!  I used cadmium in the shadows on the rock face.  L-O-V-E it!  Color complements work (blue is the complement of orange), my brain knew it in an all too academic way, but it took using it (more than once!) to really know it.