Nov 10
I am a self-taught painter even though I have a Masters degree in Painting. This is not a contradiction but a matter of fact. A painter learns by painting. If I give you instructions on how to write a piece of programming code and ask you to execute the same steps, you will learn, more or less, how to master that particular task in the same moment that you are executing. By repeating the action faithfully you will memorize the steps and be able to call the steps to your memory at will. You may be able to experiment with different variables and expand or modify the steps to meet other demands but the fact is that you have learned a piece of code you didn’t understand before.
Painting is a little different. I can teach you what I know. What I teach you is like the variable that modifies the already-known code. But this knowledge is not the code itself. The only code that exists in painting is the material;
- colours,
- a surface to arrange the colours and
- something used for arranging the colours.
I write ‘colours’ but this word is misleading because what I’m really talking about is a substance that is suspended in another substance which allows it to stick to the surface. Painting derives its infinite variety of expression from these three things.
So what I can teach you is one variety; my experience of how I have used these three things in my own way of expression. This is what every Painting teacher has taught me in my life. This is why I can say that I am a self-taught painter. In a sense, every painter is self-taught.
This doesn’t mean that there isn’t anything to learn in painting. Quite the opposite: this means that every experience that I have, and that I am conscious of, can lead to a learning experience. That new experience feeds my creativity and develops my work by providing new challenges and expression.
Recently, I have been captivated by the technique of Chinese ink Painting. I have spent time studying contemporary and traditional examples, watched videos from YouTube on the subject and executed a number of works. All of this is very stimulating for me because it pushes me to find new avenues for my expression as well as creating new dimensions for my technique.
The dimension that I am most aware of is drawing. The use of ink on paper forces me to draw freely from the brush and not with an erasable pencil sketch. It is similar to the ink pen sketches that I do but with an added challenge. I am comfortable with the pen; less comfortable with the brush. But there is a beauty in letting the brush flow on the paper and leaving a brush stroke on the paper. It’s poetry and I’m conscious of my incapacity to express much with little.
