Painting “that blue”

If there are lots of things you could paint and it’s overwhelming: try doing only one thing.

Outside on our private deck facing the Mediterranean. Wait was that me? Did I just write that?

There were the top fronds of a palm tree – we faced it directly – meaning it was three stories tall.

All you could see in this picture was the top of the palm tree, the ocean, a line where the ocean met the sky. Not a cloud. Nothing else. So I thought I would try to paint this colour of water, horizon and sky.

The colour of the water I had never seen in “real life” before.

I restricted myself to that. With my dollar store watercolour travel set and a brush I brought with me from my pencil jar at home, I set out on this self-imposed challenge.

I spent a lot of time trying.  Could I tell you how much? Nope. I lost track. So is the reward in creativity- the feeling of flow- of being so consumed. The moment that you come out on the “other side” not really knowing. It was time to go for breakfast and this creative time was over, I could feel the sun had moved, and my shade was moving along with it. I felt the temperature rise.

Did I achieve on paper what I saw in front of me?  No I don’t think so.

As with so many seemingly simple challenges – it was more difficult than it first appeared. There were so many colours in that blue.

There was a dark line at the “top of the ocean” where the water met the sky in an impossibly straight line. I had never noticed that dark blue before, made especially dark by the contrast of the near white, but not white, above it.

Perhaps I hadn’t achieved what I’d wanted on paper.

But my take away was this: in trying to create this colour and “copy it” to translate it to the page: I really saw it. I mean, I really know it in a different way than I had before – this new-to-me blue that I had only seen in paintings, photographs, and the YouTube videos I had been watching in planning our trip.

It was the realization that I was actually here. In this place, not my imagination, but for real.

And just as I was getting used to this colour – a cloud blocked the sun behind me and changed it, suddenly at first and then completely. So my moments of trying to replicate the colour were as fleeting as the scene itself.

As I was packing up my little paint set, a breeze came along and changed the lines. What was flat water was becoming choppy. What was smooth long brush strokes wasn’t true anymore.

A new neighbour at home relayed a story about how she was trying to explain to her husband why she wanted to buy flowers for the house. He thought it was a waste of money because flowers die. She maintained she still wanted to have them for the time they are beautiful. 

Was my time sitting by the Mediterranean, listening to the waves, the people, the traffic passing by below, a waste of time because I couldn’t capture the Beauty with my little postcard and watercolour paints? No.

You knew I would say no, didn’t you?

I think this for a few reasons…

I felt a deep sense of peace, having followed my curiosity – having given myself time to study this particular colour – a small slice of a scene.

The rest of the days we woke up to that view in the morning when I pushed the floor to ceiling blackout curtains to either side and opened the huge triple paned, glass doors that open from the dark silence to the overwhelming sounds of the waves, the traffic, the sounds of people in a busy city, the bright sunlight which overwhelmed the senses, the cigarette smoke from nearby neighbours even in the early morning, I saw it differently. The horizon. Where the sea met the sky – the colours change – sometimes there were triangles at a slant in the distance, a sailboat moving slowly and steadily in the distance on the line of the horizon. I would notice the outline of yachts under power – almost as though they were placed on a smooth glass table top. 

I might not have been able to capture the light, the colour or the horizon the way I would have liked with my paints, but perhaps I have shared the experience, trying with my words on these lines of the page and my blackwing matte pencil.

Creativity is not as straight a line as that horizon – on the Mediterranean – in that early morning in June. The experience of which will be forever in my memory and change how I see things when I get back home and I stare off into the distance at the Pacific in the early morning.

I wish you peace on your path.

Lise-Lotte