There’s Never Been a Wrong Painting
“There she is. Her name is Lindsey or Laurel or Betsy or something and she’s about 13 and she wants to be a painter and I’ve been meaning to get to her but, like I said, there are more and more of these needy little visionaries, just crackling with potential and waiting for direction and there’s only one of me and this is only part of who I am . . .
‘Come with me,’ I say, as gently as I can. I take her to one of the old, broken-down out-buildings. It only has three walls and no roof but that’s good because there’s plenty of light.
Once we’re inside, she sees what we’ve come for; I’ve set a blank canvas on an easel. There’s also a table with a set of oil paints and an artist’s pallet on it, and two chairs.
I sip my coffee and motion for her to sit down.
After sitting for a minute or two, she looks down at her lap and says, ‘I can never think of what to paint.’
‘I know,’ I say. ‘That’s because the part of you that does the thinking is not the part that does the painting.’
I get the sense that she’s starting to relax.
I pull my chair alongside hers and we look at the canvas. We just sit. After a few minutes, she squirms a little. Then she looks up at me, questioningly.
‘Okay,’ I say. ‘Here’s what we’re gonna do. We’re going to sit here together and look at this canvas until you see something in it.’
‘In the canvas?’ she asks. ‘But it’s blank!’ She seems downright horrified.
‘Yeah. Look,” I say, running my finger across the rough fabric. ‘You see the texture?’
She takes her finger and trails it across the material.
‘Yeah,’ she says, warming to the situation. ‘I see it. It’s nice.’
‘Well, we’re going to look at it for as long as it takes until you start to see something in that texture. You will see it; if you look at the texture long enough, how the light hits it, where the shadows fall, your eyes and mind will begin to make something of it. There’s no hurry. We can sit here for as long as it takes.’
She’s looking at me again.
‘You’ll see,’ I say, simply. And with that, we both turn our eyes back to the canvas.
It’s quite a while later when I hear her laugh to herself. I don’t say anything. She laughs again. I still don’t say anything.
‘You know,’ she says, ‘If you look right there, it kind of looks like a bird on an arm.’
‘Mmmm hmm,’ I say, matter of factly.
‘You see it?’ she asks.
‘I will when you paint it,’ I say. And with that, I get up and begin to leave.
‘Wait,’ she says, getting up from her chair.
‘Yeah?’
‘What colors should I use?’
‘The colors that make your eyes hungry,’ I say. ‘The colors that look good enough to eat. There are no wrong colors.’ I open a few tubes and dab some paints on the pallet.
‘How do I know if what I’m painting is right?’
‘There’s never been a wrong painting.’
‘Really?’ she asks.
‘There’s no such thing. Just paint what you see. Don’t let your mind get in the way. Simply see and paint. The result is not your responsibility. It is something you receive. It’s a gift. It is something that happens to you. Let it happen. Watch it happen.’”
— From the novel, “The Backstage Man”
Imagination is a way of life
