I knew when I painted a fern branch earlier this month that it would be my favorite of all the firsts. It looked real, with the variegated green leaves and authentic stems, like I’d plucked it fresh from the edge of the forest lining my driveway and placed it right here on the paper. It appeals to my simple side – – just two colors and one brush, a recycled coconut Oui glass yogurt container filled with water, and a page-bound piece of watercolor paper. And the directions.
Yes! Finally, something that looked real and that might be framed in an art gallery by some lesser-known semi-famous watercolor artist from a rural town in middle Georgia.
I liked it, so I set out to use the plain white notecards I’d found in the craft section of one of our six local Dollar Generals no more than five miles apart on every map throughout the southeastern United States to create a hand-painted notecard. And I worked and worked and started loving it, too…..until…..
…two little leaves halfway down the page and to the left of the stem became problematic. Instead of leaving them as their own sort of natural trouble, I started trying to fix them with my human eyes and perceptions of how fern leaves should look. And tried and tried, and ended up with what looked like two leaves on a stem that a novice watercolor human had tried unsuccessfully to fix. Definitely not those up to par with a semi-famous rural watercolor artist.
I’d heard that “all art is fixable,” a long time ago. I decided to text my older daughter, who had been to college as an art major, for tips on what to do. I sent her the picture and asked if she could find the mistake, thinking maybe it was just me, measuring with my own human eyes my perceptions of what a leaf should be. But she, too, found it and marked it up in her phone and sent the photo back like she’d found 1990s-famous Waldo in a red and white striped shirt sticking out like a sore thumb.
And she suggested what to do to make the art fixable…..painting a caterpillar “or something.” We continued texting, and what I love about texting with my children is that while we are talking about fixing art, we are really talking about life and its universal transfers to deeply held beliefs. I thumbed through my watercolor book and found both a ladybug and a caterpillar and decided on the caterpillar. I did NOT like that ladybug, even though I tried painting it. The legs looked a little off.
I like, too, that even though she was an art major and has so much natural talent, we are both using our “training wheel” books with the picture already sketched onto watercolor book paper. She will bloom in creativity far more quickly than I will, as she’s already ventured into salt watercolor painting, her own sketches, using filters on her camera to change photos she takes to a watercolor filter to see how she might paint something, and inherently knows more about the artistic techniques that she can apply from other art forms to watercolor painting.
And I really love that a 59-year old mother trying a new hobby can ask her 39-year old daughter who naturally gravitates to all things art like a duck takes to water, what to do about my fern leaf failure. And I love that I took her advice. I found my caterpillar directions in my training wheel book and painted this caterpillar in a smaller form, over those two bad leaves. And as soon as I began, I knew that my next lesson needed to be on perspective and dimension. I’m not sure whether the watercolor training wheel books can teach those skills, but I’m going to go into every painting henceforth reminding myself that caterpillars in the wild do not dangle like gymnasts on parallel bars from fern leaves. But my daughter, ever the optimist, found a way to add an encouraging sentiment in the text thread.
I think I like caterpillars on branches much better….and the more conceptual version of leaves, too.
Move over, Eric Carle……there’s a new hungry caterpillar in rural Georgia dangling by one suckerfoot from a fern, eating all the greenery on her quest to grow a pair of painted wings….. and take flight.
big-ass ladybug?
or one fat caterpillar?
either fixes art.
Common Threads 