I painted it after one of Dermot and Kathryn's wine-fuelled lunches, on a gloriously sunny afternoon in front of about a dozen people. I'm sure the experience was an edifying one for my students as they watched their so-called teacher getting into more and more of a muddle with his colours and the entire painting went from bad to worse.
I did the same thing in the Loire Valley ten or twelve years earlier, the incident, unlike the many decent demo's I've done, forever etched onto my mind. Then, a student and dear friend told me that my appalling demo' was the most helpful he'd ever seen. Learning from my mistakes was far more salutary, he said, than watching me slickly execute a masterpiece that he felt, in those early days, he would never be able to emulate.
There was some comfort in his remarks as I ruefully went over the events that led to this most recent disaster. It was an unpleasant and cringeworthy experience for me, but if the point of a painting holiday is instruction, then why not acknowledge and accept that one's students can learn just as much from your bad art as your good?
This is a worthwhile idea, but only if we can bear to face up to our mistakes and without any unnecessary breast-beating, dwell on them a little, learn from them and move on.
In one of my local classes, at a quarter to four every thursday afternoon, I would hear the sound of tearing. The perpetrator was Patricia, for whom part of the packing-up procedure was the ripping up of whatever she'd spent the last one and three quarter hours painting. She never liked what she produced and didn't see the point in taking it home, so into the waste bin it would go, in a dozen tiny pieces. She looked blissful while she was doing it, too.
I was never able to convince Patricia that she should hold on to these 'ghastly' creations of hers and attempt to glean something of their merits as well as their de-merits. In this way, she might have learned what she needed to do in order to produce work that pleased her. But no, no work of art could be more pleasing to her than the sound of tearing. In the end, with nothing to show for all the days she spent labouring at her watercolours but a full waste bin, she gave up.
So what are the particular merits and de-merits of my own watercolour disaster?
Well, now that I look at it with a degree more objectivity than I possessed after three glasses of vermentino, I can see that it might have worked. At the time, however, it wasn't the picture that I wanted to paint.
But what did I want to paint?
That it seems, is the crux of the matter. I don't think I really knew. Apart from the fact that I wanted it to be terribly impressive, the rest is a little vague. I just started flinging paint around and hoping for the best. It works sometimes, but not necessarily in front of a dozen people on a hot hillside. On that particular day, I did not get lucky and I couldn't see any potential in the marks I was making. There were no serendipitous insights and then I committed the greatest of all cardinal sins: I got bored.
The purpose of painting is not to show that you are good at it, rather it is to engage with your subject on an intimate level and communicate that engagement.
“In painting," said Matthew Smith, "the gravest immorality is to try to finish what isn’t well begun. But a picture that is well begun may be left off at any point.”
Salient words, but dipping your paint brush in bile green doesn't help either.
And here's an excellent RSA video on making mistakes by Kathryn Schulz:
http://www.thersa.org/events/video/archive/kathryn-schulz
