Find Your Joy Taster

Lesson Three: Ugly Painting

I adore lesson three from Louise Fletcher’s Find Your Joy Taster Course 2024. The class is closed now, but I’m encouraging you to paint along with me as I work my way slowly through the class over the next couple of weeks.

If you missed a lesson, no worries, you can go back and catch up.

Here’s lesson one: The Six Grids

Lesson two: One subject two ways

Lesson Three

Lesson three is to “Paint Ugly.” Paint with whatever colors, using whatever tools and medium you want. If you see the painting starting to become “pretty,” mess it up.

Henceforth, I will break out this lesson whenever I try something new. What a relief to think, “Ah, ugly, ugly, ugly. Brilliant! That’s exactly what I’m after.”

I don’t know if you’re anything like me, but I scroll through Instagram occasionally—very occasionally as it compels me to make a hard right turn into the cul de sac of Compare and Despair; I have a hard time finding my way out of that small street—and I see something I want to try. And then I freeze.

I begin overthinking. What brushes, what paint, what paper? Wait, how did she do that? Let me watch the same tiny loop and find YouTube videos, and before I know it, two hours are gone, never to be brought back, and I’ve not swished one dab of paint on paper.

This overthinking business gets me in trouble all the time. If that’s you, I also have a great book to recommend: On Not Being Able to Paint by Joana Field. Her pen name is Marion Miller. It’s an old book and, unfortunately, out of print. But you can find it for under $8 and sometimes get free shipping on Abebooks.

Joana seems to have crawled into my head when she writes, “I … so often came away from a morning spent painting with a sense of futility, a sense of how much better it would have been to get on with something practical that really needed doing…. I often felt while out painting, both exalted and yet guilty, as if I were evading something that the people round me, busy with their daily lives, were facing, that their material was real life and mine was dreams.”

I feel this sense of guilt and aversion very acutely when making “ugly paintings,” which is to say, anytime I’m doing something new and challenging. The problem is that to keep painting interesting and exciting, I’m constantly wading into water just over my head. And so round and round I go, tiptoeing into the deep end, flailing about, and quickly going to the shallow end where my talent safely touches the ground while my heart longs for deep water.

Lesson Three, Ugly Painting, saved me! I wanted to try a painting technique that was all the rage at the Hearst Center for the Arts Thursday Painters. Several painters were making these gorgeous globe paintings that felt like portals into another world. The paintings were inspired by Joanagray75 on Instagram. I wanted to make one of these little magic portals into another world in the worst way.

Photo Courtesy JoannaGray75

And I wanted to make a video for all of you. So why not marry the two ideas? A confession: the only way I could plunge into ugly was to have such a pressing, non-negotiable deadline that I’d start. This meant I didn’t have time to double check my camera angle. Yep, it’s a black-sided video again this week! I’ve got a new holder ordered. Hopefully, it will come soon, so I can’t mess this up anymore. But in the meantime, you get a double dose of ugly.

You’ll also hear my sweet prince charming in the background time checking me. My non-negotiable deadline was a date night with my husband and friends.

I think I knocked ugly out of the park

.What do you think?

Ugly but alive and promising. So I had another go a couple of days later.

I needed a small painting for the Iowa Watercolor Society’s Minature Show. So why not this one, which I call New Dawn?

In part the name comes from the dawning realization that ugly is just a small, necessary step towards creating. It felt like a reward to take something that didn’t start out pretty and expose it to you and everyone who visits the IWS Minature Show.

The show runs from Oct. 1 to 30, 2024, at the Waukee Public Library, 950 Warrior Ln, Waukee, IA. If you’re in the area, stop by, and see the show.

You, too, can join in the fun. The deadline to enter is Sept. 28th. The cost to enter is $10 per painting, with a limit of two paintings. You must be a member of the Iowa Watercolor Society. But if you’re not, don’t despair, join! It’s only $30 for an annual membership. Membership gives you opportunities for classes, contests, shows, and loads of opportunities to meet other artists.

If you've made it this far, remember to share your paintings on the Cedar Valley Painters Facebook Page. I’d love to see what you do!

xo

Felicia

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