Watercolors

I saw watercolor on the menu at the Contemporary and something about it jumped off the page. I hadn’t touched watercolors since I was a kid. Hadn’t even thought about them at all. But there it was, and the fact that it was a watercolor portrait class made it even more interesting. So I signed up, thinking I was going to crush it. I did not crush it.

The first portrait I made looked like a kindergarten student did it. I’m not being humble. It was bad. The kind of bad where you’re embarrassed to show it as a grown man. I had to laugh at myself because the gap between what I expected and what I produced was enormous.

The problem was that I came in thinking watercolor would work like drawing. You put something down and it stays where you put it. Watercolor doesn’t operate that way. The medium has its own mind. The water moves the pigment wherever it wants, and you can either learn to work with that or you can fight it and end up with a mess. I spent most of my time fighting it.

The teacher kept telling us to paint in layers and let those layers dry before adding the next one. Simple enough instruction. But I couldn’t do it. I’d paint a layer and immediately go back in before it was ready. Every time. And the result was muddy, smudged, and nothing like what I intended. I kept making the same mistake over and over, even when I thought I was being patient. I wasn’t. I just thought I was. That was the real lesson. Not that watercolor is hard, but that I’m impatient. More impatient than I realized. And it showed up on the paper every single time I rushed.

There’s a huge element of surrender in watercolor. You don’t control the medium. You guide it, and then you have to trust what happens. You have to wait. You have to let the layers settle. And if you do, the paint has its own unique characteristics that make it special, things you couldn’t have planned or forced. But if you rush it, you get mud. It never really came together for me during that class. I never made the portrait I wanted to make. But I kept going. I kept working with it. And what I took from the experience was more valuable than a finished piece.

Looking back now, I can see how watercolor connects to so much of what I’ve been learning in life. It’s a lot like what I went through with the Heat, trusting a process that feels muddy and messy in the moment. Not understanding why things have to happen the way they do. Wanting to rush ahead to the result. But when you let things dry and settle, when you give the process the time it needs, it has a way of working out with its own unique beauty that you couldn’t have forced.

In the moment, you can just be frustrated that it’s taking the time that it takes. But that’s the point. Sometimes you just have to wait a bit longer. No need to always rush. Things will work out if you give them the space to.

I’m glad I was open enough to have the experience and to keep showing up even when every portrait looked like a mess. Because watercolor didn’t teach me how to paint. It taught me how impatient I am. And that awareness alone was worth every muddy layer.