May 17-19th / Detroit, MI 2019
The painting lessons from this weekend stretch well beyond painting. Felicia Forge carries her 20+ years of painting in the way she does everything, from holding a paintbrush to addressing her students’ questions and qualms. How exactly, is she so good? She says, “I’m not any better than anyone, I just try more times (to get the color, the likeness, the feeling, right). That’s why I’m good.”
Painting is no easy task, especially if you dare to try to represent your subject accurately. Not fancy flair accurate… truly accurate. The exact color on the cheeks above and under the cheekbone. No assumptions, 100% honesty. You have to stare and squint and let yourself go, forget you even exist, to begin to see the subtleties. If you do it enough, you will embody it. At least, I know and believe that now after observing Felicia’s style of both painting and being. They say never meet your herores, but what if you meet someone and they accidentally become one of your most impactful role models?
Nowadays everyone wants to be an artist, probably moreso than ever. There’s no more starving if you compare it to the past decades, centuries. You can do whatever you want as long as you put it on Instagram. If you put it on Instagram every day, no matter what kind of art it is, people start to pay attention and validation floods the insecurities, granting delusions of grandeur.
I know this because I suffer from this dualistic struggle for self-achievement. This weekend I learned that at the end of the day, it isn’t about me. It isn’t about the painting. It’s about the truth.
I expected to attend a workshop and feel really bad at painting, which absolutely happened immediately. I almost ruined the second of three works made in Felicia’s studio before she walked up and dared me to stick with it. “You can’t ruin an oil painting.” You can’t ruin an oil painting! Here I’ve been working in watercolor and hating or glorifying myself about it for years.
Everywhere I look I see a painting. This syndrome should be titled, painter’s eye or something more suitable. It’s a beautiful condition, and it lasts just about as long as you’ve painted last. I see the darks and lights, the cools and warms. I think I’m actually going to begin oil painting weekly now, if I can help it, daily. It’s only been on my mind oh, for since before I even dared to pool myself into this ever growing category of “Artist”. I was lost in the sauce of searching for subject matter when it’s been around me every day.
Speaking on that, Felicia said, if you make a mark and you can’t get it right, but refuse to patiently try again (until you do the study, the practice, the likeness, true justice…), if you do it wrong and say it was on purpose to cover yourself, well then you aren’t an artist yet. I needed to hear that so badly. In my previous entry I wrote about why I paint, and this is precisely why. The patience and honesty I search for towards myself in every other aspect of life is exemplified perfectly by what it takes to make a good oil painting. I probably won’t make my first good one for years but for once that isn’t the point. The point is not to run away from it, or sloppily paint just to post it, or just to see the likes come in, or just to keep going because I know that there is goodness and truth underneath…. the point is to stick with life so closely that each painting feels intimate. The point is to keep the conversation going, and to speak without words, which is the only true effective way to communicate anything to another human being.
Below are two studies of mine from the workshop.
