Last year, I was invited to Holland to teach a three day masterclass in watercolor on claybord. You may remember the story from here.

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It was better than I could have imagined. Margo made me feel so welcomed. I didn’t have to think about anything other than teaching. I felt like a rock star, tbh.

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First, the bed and breakfast was next door to the class location and so charming. Paul, the owner, is a lovely person and the breakfasts were delicious. I think about them all the time.

Second, Margo is generous with her time and knowledge. She patiently answered all my questions and held my hand every step of the way. She and Wilco go out of their way to make her students and teachers feel comfortable and well taken care of.

Third, she surrounds herself with kind, welcoming, and eager to learn students. Margo sets her teachers up for success in every way imaginable which, in turn, sets her students up for success.

Let me describe a day* in the life of Margo’s teachers:

9am: I’d wake up and get ready before heading down to breakfast. The fruit was the most delicious I’ve ever tasted and the bread was like little clouds of heaven. America, why don’t we have bread like this?

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10am: I’d meet Margo at the class building where we would have coffee and chat about the plan for the day.

10:30am: Class would start with a quick critique of the work done the day before and a 10-15 minute demo. Then we would both walk around helping students with their paintings.

Sometime around 12pm: We’d stop for coffee/tea and some cookies/chocolate. We’d gather in the lunch area and chat. Then we’d go back for another short demo. (I need more of this in my life.)

2pm: We’d stop for a huge, delicious lunch. I have a sensitivity to black pepper and Margo always made sure the lunch had options for me. She was better at remembering it than I am myself. Then I had the opportunity to go for a walk or back to my room if I needed a break.

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3pm: Another quick demo before more painting.

4:30pm: We’d stop for another coffee/tea and chat.

5:30pm: We’d say goodnight to the students and clean up. I tried to help with this, but they would usually shoo me off after a bit. They were insistent on wanting me to relax and enjoy my time, but it was almost more arduous to let them work so tirelessly while I did nothing. The jet lag had their back though. Once they were ready to go, we would grab some dinner and discuss the day. They fed me like I haven’t been fed since my Grandma passed away and it was all delicious.

By 8 or 9pm I was back at the B&B getting ready for bed.

Throughout the day Wilco, was constantly checking on everyone and working diligently to keep everything running while Margo and I did our thing. At one point he told the student they could come cry on his shoulder if they needed to and when they were done, they had go back to work. That guy’s married to an artist.

Margo and Wilco:

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*Times may not reflect the actual time of day.

Check out some of these paintings the students did on the last day:

It’s amazing how the brain works. Last year, when I did The Artist’s Way, the hardest thing for me was the artist’s dates.

I kept hitting a wall because all the suggestions were not my idea of a good time and I am already alone so much. Having to be alone seemed pointless.

Due to some events before I left for Holland that were a little…unorthodox… (trust me, one other person and I find that pun hilarious. Ok, it’s probably just me.), dating has been on my mind the past few weeks. The romantic kind. The past few years the only time I’ve thought about dating was when I was feeling a little lonely, as humans are want to do, or the artist dates. Dating because you are lonely is not a good idea and I think that may have been part of the block for the artist dates. If you don’t want to date, you don’t want to date. Even if it is a super interesting artist you have literally everything in common with.

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I had the opportunity to witness one or two seemingly, perfectly matched couples over the last month. It’s much easier to get excited about dating in general when you can witness good pairings in real life and be excited on their behalf. When I see two people who come together and form a powerhouse of combined passion and interests mixed with support, it’s like seeing the promised land. Possibly witnessing it twice in a month, got my attention. Oh yeah, dating can be super exciting if it’s the right person. How does this connect with The Artist’s Way?

I kept trying to date my inner artist like she was just some generic artist. Not like someone I would date date. Not like she’s the right person. The difference being, if I date date, I want to make it an experience they enjoy. I love romance. I hate generic romance. Sure, dinners and a walk are nice at the beginning when you don’t know the person, but after that, there needs to be some effort. You have to show the person you know them. You get them. Have you seen the Grey’s Anatomy McDreamy proposal scene?

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Basically, I can’t date my artist by taking her to thrift stores when we both hate thrift stores. Sometimes I can date her by taking her to a museum and showing her lovely things, but that only gets me basic points. My artist deserves more than basic artist dates. My artist deserves to see proof of my full love and devotion.

This is where Holland and Paris come in. While I was in Holland, it was brought to my attention sketching gives me energy. Obviously, art does, but I never paid attention to how sketching, specifically, makes me feel. In Paris, on a particularly rough afternoon, I went to sketch. I tuned in to how I felt and I realized it truly centered me and allowed me to feel the joy of being in Paris after a bad morning.

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Awesome.

I signed up for some sketch classes to give myself some direction and help get into a daily habit.

I still didn’t get the entire message the universe was trying to send. I kept having this nagging feeling once I left Paris that I needed to just travel and explore, even if it was just a day trip. I need to explore the world on my own terms. With a sketchbook. Not necessarily alone, but definitely not prioritizing someone else’s experience over my artist’s.

Then it hit me. That’s my artist. I need to date my artist and not an “artist.” My artist needs experimenting. She needs color theory. She needs exploring and adventure. She needs to see, process, and then express the world around her with line, values, color, and capture that memory through all her senses.

I know this, I just wasn’t putting in the effort to make the dates reflect this knowledge.

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My ideas: Explore St. Louis neighborhoods and parks and quirky cafe’s/restaurants. Spend the day driving to a nature preserve in Illinois or Missouri or an interesting town. Study color theory. Customizing the sketch classes to fit the date requirements. Studying different palettes/tools/materials for urban sketching and experimenting. Make myself a new, date tool bag. Going to a place I’ve sketched before, but with different materials and sketching the same scene. Or even just a different time of day. Pick my drawing tools randomly or with dice or a number system to force play. Have someone give me a random suggestion. Use different line quality or no line at all. Go to a new art store and buy something I can’t buy from one around me, then use it right away. Like a the nerdy kid using all the new pens before the first day of school that I am. An exercise from one of my art books, but in a new location.

Obvious back ups would be an artist talk or a trip to a museum.

I can be slow to get the message sometimes, but I’d like to think it’s always worth the effort.

My artist is going to be so effing wooed. Like no artist has ever been wooed before.

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I am obsessed. I went to see the Kehinde Wiley: St. Louis exhibit 3 times in 5 days. It is a once in a life time show. Wiley went to Ferguson, asked people if he could paint them, took poses from master paintings at the museum and RECREATED THE POSES WITH POWERFUL BLACK FIGURES!

I didn’t know anything about the show before hand or that it was even happening. I went because a group of friends wanted to see a design and architecture show. I only knew he painted Obama’s portrait.

I left with the feeling I had witnessed a profound reclamation of space and territory that rightfully belongs to not just Wiley, but every one of his subjects.

The first time I went I was so overwhelmed with these larger than life portraits and the lush details. I got lost in feeling these portraits take over the museum, even though they are in a relatively small area. The overwhelming feeling was of power and defiance. I loved every second I spent witnessing a room full of black portraiture, not in a gallery, not in a contemporary museum, but in a historical and institutional museum like SLAM. Where 99% of the paintings are of and by white people. These paintings owned every bit of that space and dared anyone to question their place there.

Obviously, I spent plenty of time soaking up the folds of fabric and reflective light* and facial expressions, but that’s truly only the surface of this experience and if that had been my only time there, I would have missed so much. Although, it would have still been a mesmerizing exhibit. Ask anyone who happened to come into contact with me the first 24 hours after. I might as well have mainlined the show. High was the only way to describe how I felt.

In fact, I went back the very next afternoon. This time I noticed how he treats women. Normally, I am not about men painting women and their issues. It is typically virtue signaling and clearly the men want pats on the back for being so empathetic, yet they fail to realize they only understand those issues on a surface level. It never even occurs to them to ask women if their representations are even accurate. I’ve literally seen men argue with women about how the man’s work is feminist and not degrading. In general, men need to step aside and let a woman have that space.

Wiley is an honorary woman, in my book. He definitely doesn’t need my approval and he may not want to be an honorary woman, but I bow down to his masterful and considerate portrayal of women in these works. First of all, he takes the pose of Three Girls In A Wood by Otto Müller for his own painting titled Three Girls In A Wood and not only does refuse to paint them nude, he paints them in clothes of their choosing, as he does with all of his subjects. He gives them a voice in their own depiction.

Don’t get me wrong, I love a good nude body as much as the next person, but Wiley consciously deciding not to objectify them and to let them decide how they wanted to be presented is the best way to amplify the voices of women when they don’t get a place to speak for themselves.

Second, his paintings show the imperfections. Not in a trite, “look at how brave this actress is for not wearing make-up,” way. In a, “this is how people and bodies are and that’s how he represents them,” way. He doesn’t glorify the imperfection. He just lets them be. In the aforementioned, Three Girls In A Wood the shape of a bra strap can be seen through a shirt. In another painting, the outline of the bra cups. In a society where panty lines are smoothed out and girls are sent home from school for an exposed shoulder, not to mention airbrushing, he’s allowing women to just exist without covering up or exploiting their flaws. There’s no need to change anything about them. What a truly revolutionary concept. In both paintings, the effect is subtle. The imperfections are there as well as their fierceness.

The third time I went to see this show, I finally realized how he tied it all together. One thing I found so brilliant is his utilization of these intense patterns was that he made them seem completely natural. My eye didn’t fight between the figure and pattern, even when the pattern tried to engulf the figure. Each figure looks perfectly anchored in their setting.

His use of reflective light was satisfying from the first time I stood in front of these works. I kept looking back at those areas and pointing them out to people I was with. On a couple, I even noticed how the color of the back ground was used in the reflective light right away. Maybe I’m just a little slow on the uptake, but I’m going with part of his mastery is the subtlety of his use of background color in his reflective light. These paintings are on average 8′ x 6′ and the color choices are in your face. It was impossible for me to truly take a painting in as a whole right away. So, my ego demands, it’s not at fault it took me three visits to realize Wiley uses the colors from the patterned background in the reflective light almost all the time. There’s just too much brilliance to take in at once.

In some, like the lower right (your right) pant leg in Jacob de Graeff, it is the main background color. In others, like Portrait of Florentine Nobleman or Portrait of Mahogany Jones and Marcus Stokes he uses a secondary background color. No matter which he chooses, the effect is one of seamlessly merging flat, intricate patterns and fully rendered portraits into one, shared reality.

It makes me weak in the knees.

The first night I walked away from this show the only way I could accurately describe it was life affirming. I was so grateful to witness this moment in time. With every fiber of my being, I say it was an honor to stand in the same room as these paintings.

*Reflective light: Light bouncing off an object near the main subject and lighting the shadow side of the subject. The reflective light carries the color of the near-by object and reflects it onto the main subject. For example, if you have a white sphere on a green table, the light would bounce off the table and turn the under side of the white sphere green.