by Pastor Audrey
The first exercise in our series on Painting as a Spiritual Practice was to draw a series of lines. Each line had to touch two edges. First a straight line, then another straight line that intersected with the first. Then a wavy line. A spiral – can a spiral be a line? Someone suggested a dotted or dashed line, which just about blew my mind. I decided to incorporate one of these into my piece. You can tell how uncertain I am about this by where I placed it – relegated to the corner. As I continued on, making wavy and curved lines, I found I hated that dashed line, it was just so ugly and felt so out of place. And then, as I began filling in the various shapes with color (we only worked with primary colors), I had an idea: let the color bleed.
The lines we drew with a black marker had a quality to them that made me think of stained glass. So I filled in each section meticulously, careful not to paint ‘outside the lines.’ But this dashed line was permeable. I wet the paper in that area and a bit beyond with clean water. Then I painted the red inside, which traveled outside the dashed line. In watercolor, the pigment will, as a rule, stay where the water has been laid down. It cares not about lines and where they’re drawn. Then I painted the yellow outside the dashed line knowing it, too, would migrate toward the red paint, not caring that another color was already there. They just blend and dance their way around each other.
As soon as I did this I almost laughed out loud with sheer delight. Something I had not liked at all was transformed and became the major statement of the whole piece.