I have a fool life. (Read to the bottom, I dare you!)

So my especially dear friend Nancy told me years ago when I was juggling a stressful corporate career, a relationship, a social life and a house. Nowadays life seems infinitely more meaningful. I still have several balls in the air: kids, husband, home, painting, writing. So much more worth caring about. If I could have seen my life now when I was still in my thirties, it would have improved my perspective! It all begs the question: what will happen in another 20 years? It's hard to guess, but let me fill you in on a few things that are happening right this week:

1. This Saturday, November 2, 5-8pm, Saccarappa Art Collective in Westbrook Maine ( https://www.facebook.com/SaccarappaArtCollective ) opens its new exhibit with a wine-and hors d'ouevres reception.

Forest Dance, 16x16" acrylic on canvas, by Mary Brooking 2013

I'll be exhibiting several of my paintings from my week in the Bigelow Mountains last month. All our regular members will be there with new work on the walls. Our guest artists are Charles Thompson, Francine Schrock and Laurie Proctor LeFebvre - all three paint the world they see around them in the form of landscape painting - as I do. I've seen the show going up, and it's exciting and colorful. We always have the most wonderful openings - if you're local I hope you can join us.

2. I'm taking orders now for my 2014 calendar! 

It is 8x8", $15 + tax and shipping where applicable. If you want to order one, please leave a comment at the end of this post, or message me through http://www.marybrooking.com/ . Remember the holidays are coming! I had several people tell me last year that they gave my calendars as gifts.

3. If I ranked this list from biggest to smallest, this news item would be first: I'm opening a studio on Main Street! No photos yet, but I'll post some soon. For the first time in sixteen years, going to work will mean leaving my house! I'm over-the-moon excited about this amazing opportunity to become a presence in Westbrook's growing downtown. I move in on December 1. Is there gonna be a party? In time for holiday shopping?? With reduced prices on all original work??? And are my calendars gonna be on sale there???? Ya-baby!!!!

More on this later. Right now, it's Halloween, and I have one kid inviting a friend over to make costumes and have dinner before trick-or-treating, and the other one trying to convince me to let him go to a sleepover party. Fool life, remember? Celebrate safely, everyone.

Sweet Little Highway

Sweet Little Highway (in progress), 4x4"

Sunday morning I was up early, haggard and nervy after a night of very little rest. (I have teenagers. Untroubled rest is a luxury.) Nevertheless, the car was packed and I was ready. I hit the drive-through for coffee, and then I hit the road.

Magic is in the air at such an hour (it wasn't really that early, but it felt early to me), when you are off on an adventure - and I was decidedly pursuing adventure. I'd been invited to the mountain retreat of a collector of my paintings. At one point, I glanced off the highway to my left and saw a painting: gray clouds, strip of aqua sky, red-brown trees, ocher meadow and umber soil. I remembered the layers, one, two, three, four, five. And I drove north.

The deal was, I'd spend five days all alone at the house on the mountain, painting. My host would choose one painting to keep in return for her hospitality. It's a great deal. I'd do it again in a heartbeat.

The house was sumptuous and pristine; I determined to live in it with as little impact as possible. I didn't unpack any more than I needed to wear or to use at a time. In the kitchen, I used one cup, one spoon, one knife, cleaning and returning everything to its place as soon as I finished. I found I enjoyed living this way: rootlessly, almost stealthily. All of me was in my painting, walking, eating and sleeping. There was no internet service. I was unconnected. It felt wonderful.

What sort of people trust like this: to allow someone they know so little to live alone in their private sanctuary for five days? Trusting that I wouldn't steal, or set fires, or fall downstairs and sue them? Wonderful people.

My surroundings overawed me at first. I wasn't ready to paint the views of mountains ranging away layer on layer. Instead, the first day, I painted the scene from the highway: gray, aqua, brown, ocher, umber, a tiny glimpse.

What state is so rich in beautiful scenery, that a glance toward the side of the highway is a painting? My wonderful state of Maine.

I sat listening for a while, and heard breeze-stirred leaves, and occasional bird calls. That's all. The mountains changed continually with the weather and the movement of the earth beneath the sun. The morning after the first night, I took a walk. I got out my easel. I painted. The next day I walked again, and painted. That night I heard a wolf howl in the woods. The third day, I saw a moose perhaps a hundred feet in front of me. It moved so silently, and disappeared so quickly, I was astounded. Talk about stealthy. So I walked, and I painted - for five days.

On Friday morning, I packed the car early - truly early this time! - and drove back into my life. I hugged my kids (before they rushed off to their next social events) and kissed my amazingly supportive husband. I set up for my new class cycle, which begins Monday. That night I slept like a baby.

Art and life may seem to imitate each other at times, but really they are the same thing, I think. Either way it's all about perspective.

 

Yellow Trees (working title) (in progress) 18x18"

Creative courage

Reflected Glory, 20x20"

The other day in the studio I was listening to a Public Radio article on creativity while I painted. I'm sorry I can't credit the producer or any of the sources referred to in the article - I was in my painting brain, weighing colors and shapes, hearing the broadcast resonated through my own thoughts and intuitions about what I was doing. What I heard was that many CEOs nowadays seek employees who are not what we used to call "company people." Instead they realize that people who think and perform in ways outside the norm tend to have the ideas needed to propel their company forward through fast-changing times and technologies. Creative people. These people, they find, make lots of mistakes.  Who would have thought 30 years ago that people who do things in unusual ways and make a lot of mistakes would now be prized as corporate employees? Turns out, it's people who are OK taking risks, even if it means making mistakes now and then, are the same ones who innovate the billion-dollar ideas. And these smart CEOs are giving these creative people the license to invent new ways and risk making some mistakes without fear of being fired for it - and this is paying off. Think Zuckerberg, if you will.

That's why it's so vital to fund arts education in schools: it provides our children with multiple alternative approaches to life's problems. Frees them to search other parts of their brains besides the logical left lobe to look for new ways, and to experiment until something works.

Here's the thing: until we let go of our fear of failing - until we risk making a mistake, losing our way, having a great idea turn into a mess of soggy paper and a night of lost sleep, we aren't free to access our full creative power. Fear turns creative passion to icy sludge.

And I thought: That's what I've been telling my students. Well, maybe not in so many words - but it was what I was trying to give them: permission to listen to their creative intuition, and to try. And to fail. And to try again.

We've all been there. What creative people do - what you do - when faced with a problem, is look fear in the eye - and rock on.

Thoughts on Painting and Teaching

Pine Cone's View, 12x12"

I love balancing between realism and abstraction. I think for me it has a lot to do with the way I see the world. Our eyes supply basic information: color, shape, texture. The mind does a lot of filling-in based on what we already know. We don't actually see what we think we see. Maybe that's why everyone's truth is so unique. I attempt to bypass preconception. Sometimes I succeed.

I've got big walls to fill in August, so I have some 30x30" canvases in my studio.

I've cleaned and organized the studio. I've finished the little framing job I needed to do. I've written and edited my curriculum. I've gathered most of the supplies I need for the class I teach beginning on Monday morning.

I've heard heart-wrenching stories from students who used to paint but needed a job with health benefits. Or they went to art school and a professor wanted to know what the hell they were doing there. Or they've made a successful career in the arts, but don't know what they want to do now. They just want to paint but they are stuck, stuck, stuck.

"Will my lack of experience take up too much of the class's time?" "I have NO talent!" "I gave up so long ago, my paints all dried up." But they still want to paint. Some of us just do, that's all. But too many of us are self-effacing.

What I've learned from my students is that more than "how" to paint, many people need to learn it's OK to paint. This is sad - of course it's OK, it's just paint! I think what they're struggling to learn is that it's OK not to be perfect ... OK to make some mistakes ... OK to learn from them - or just to paint over them!

Which brings me back to my clean and organized studio, and the 30x30" canvases that are now looking at me. Blankly.

Pine Cone's View is a synthesis based on a series of plein-aire paintings I made at Pemaquid Point. It's on exhibit right now at Saccarappa Art Collective, along with the plein-aire paintings. This is the direction that jazzes me. It's both representational and abstract. But it's only 12x12". My canvases are 30x30". Deep breaths...

Students, I'm with you - so with you, in fact, I'm one of you! On Monday we're going to give ourselves permission to paint what we paint. Then we'll keep painting until we paint what we want.

Off to Pemaquid Point

 Monhegan From Pemaquid, 2012

I don't post nearly as often as I should. I haven't posted a word about the class I taught - and what it taught me. I will, pretty soon! But today, I'm packing for the retreat on Pemaquid Point. It's sponsored by the Pastel Painters of Maine, but they don't object to having me and my acrylics along for the ride. I went last year and it was wonderful: a little room in the Pemaquid Hotel and a big studio in the carriage house across the road.

What is it about artists - and writers - that we so often need to retreat from the world we usually inhabit? Our batteries seem to require a great deal of charging.

Speaking for myself, I find that working creatively both costs and pays a lot of personal energy. The getting-away thing is less about nurturing the creative mind than it is about shaking the Etch-A-Sketch to erase all the expectations that build up so quickly, about who we are and how we work, and how we allocate time.

So, I bid adieu for the weekend, to my family, and to the usual me. I'll open the windows, and let the sea breeze in.

"Can we come too?"

Bon Voyage

This week I'm saying farewell again, to an old friend who left a year ago for a better place. She was one of my oldest and dearest - someone I could call up and tell anything, and she'd laugh with me, or get mad at whoever had ticked me off, or tell me what crazy thing happened to her that was nearly as good - or as bad - as what happened to me. You know, one of those rare friends. And call her I did, often enough, because although we shared a dorm one year in college in another century, we spent most of our lives afterward living in different states. A year ago, breast cancer took her farther away than satellite technology can reach, but I still talk to her anyway.

Back in the day, she could have made phone yakking an Olympic event. She was a great talker, but one of the rare ones who's equally skilled at listening - and also one of the few people I've ever been able to talk to while painting.

This one, Coastline, came along during one of our conversations. a few years back. It's all about rolling waves and turbulence, the curvature of the earth that separates, but also holds us together, and fragile boundaries that never really manage to divide anything important. It's always been one of my favorites, and last week someone had the very good sense, in my humble opinion, to buy it. Now it's back in the studio for framing before heading out to its new home.

Bon voyage.

Dear Students,

The day is coming... I'm teaching my first acrylic painting class next Monday morning, March 25th, at Saccarappa Art collective in Westbrook, Maine. 

OK, if you read my blog entry about teaching painting, you know that I have been too scared to do this until now, even though I've taught other stuff and a good many people have told me they’d like to take a painting class from me.

Why? Well, I was raised to never tell others what to do, for one thing. (Although my kids would probably tell you I’m pretty good at telling them what NOT to do.) But especially when it comes to creative expression. I grew up in the freewheeling 1970s, when the country  was all you do your thing, and I’ll do mine, and there was no wrong way in art.

And actually, I still feel pretty much that way. If you want a teacher to tell you, “First do this, and then do that,” I’m sorry. I’m not going to be that teacher. I’d rather give you a few basic tips and demonstrate my way of working, and then try to empower you to paint your own way. I’ll be with you for your questions and stuck places, but you’re not a passenger here, I want you to drive your bus.

So, that’s one of the things that intimidated me about teaching this class: the possibility that I might not live up to people’s expectations of what a painting teacher should be. 

Another thing that makes teaching difficult for me is that the art side of my brain and the talking side seem to live a good distance apart from each other, like across town and not on a bus line, so I have trouble articulating what I’m doing with paint while I’m doing it. I usually do my best work without remembering thinking about it at all – in fact, I love not thinking. So please bear with me while I stumble around searching for words to express myself about making art!

The one circumstance where I intend to tell you firmly what to do is when I think you should STOP painting, and look at what you have done. If I yell STOP at you, it won’t be because you have done anything wrong – it’ll be because it’s time to take a break and notice what’s working well with your painting and think about how to make sure you don’t overwork it. I’d like stopping and looking at our own and each other’s work to be something we all get used to doing a few times each session.

Materials

I have paper, paint and brushes for you to work with. I also have canvasboards that you can buy from me for $2 each if you prefer, or you can bring your own media, but paper is enough. I have old crappy brushes, because I like working with them. I find that cheap materials free me from fear about ruining things. You are welcome to bring your own nice brushes if that’s what you prefer. I have some tabletop easels and some boards and tape you can use. You’re welcome to bring something of your own to paint on if you’d rather. We have a terribly small sink to rinse our brushes in, unfortunately, but I have some fairly large water containers. PLEASE be very careful not to spill paintwater on the floor! And no throwing paint. Sorry, it would be fun, but there are too many paintings in harm’s way in the gallery.

Lesson Plan

This is pretty loosey-goosey, as you will no doubt come to expect from me. I will show examples of landscapes, both photographic and painted.

Then I’ll share with you a painting I did fairly quickly, and show you approximately how I did it - and how a painting can be changed on the spur of the moment.

We’ll do a bit of color mixing, and I’ll share a few basic tips about that.

And then you’ll paint, from a photograph (yours or mine) or from memory or imagination. When using a photograph for reference, do not copy it. Try setting up your reference photo across the room where you can’t see the details. Better yet, take a look at it and then turn it over or put it somewhere you can’t see it at all. Improvise, make it different; make it your own vision. Don’t like the color of a house, the ground, the sky? Change it. Tree blocking the view you want? Get rid of it. You can literally move mountains if you choose to.

The Sky is NOT Blue

At a party last weekend, the subject of teaching classes came up AGAIN. I have been planning a new class since late last year. I want to encourage people to paint beyond what they think, and into the realm of what they intuit - or what they believe can be. Or what they want. I want to impart a message that despite persistent rumors, the sky isn't always blue, nor does it need to be.

I want to teach people how to turn a square of canvas or paper into a window on a world all their own. I want each of my students to have a painting they've done themselves, that's ready to frame by the end of the course.

Once again, at the party - which happened to be a celebration of a friend's first year in a new creative business - people wanted to hear about this class. They wanted to take my class. Why haven't I begun teaching it after lo these many moons? Fear. Fear of not being able to communicate. Talking has never been my strong suit. Talking while painting - oy.

Ironic, right? I've said I want to encourage people, when I myself suffer from a lack of courage.

"You've just got to shut that b_____ up!" my friend advised. "She dogged me the whole time I was planning my new business. Now she's sitting right on your shoulder, telling you you can't do this."

I'm guessing you've made the acquaintance of "the little voice." You know, the one that says, "You can't do that - who do you think you are anyway?"

So. Determined to shake her loose, I have ordered tabletop easels for my students. Thrown down the gauntlet, as it were!

Classes will commence at Saccarappa Art Collective in Westbrook on six Monday mornings from 10 until noon beginning on March 18. Contact the gallery (link in the nav bar) or me to sign up. I'll need at least five students prior to Saturday March 15. $120 per person, basic supplies included. I'll start with a short demo and some examples, then a bit of color theory. We'll go from there.

Lucky Pink Cat Mug

Monday morning while I was drinking coffee out of my lucky pink cat mug, the red phone rang! It was a commission, for a painting, maybe two or three. There was a strict color palette, and a deadline: the end of the week! I jotted down notes and disappeared into the studio, reminiscing nostalgically about the corporate world. Back in the day, I would roll out of bed and hop on a downtown bus or train, ready to drink my first cup of coffee and find out what creative magic was expected of me on that day. 

That afternoon I emailed the first image to the contact, and the client had changed his mind - now they only wanted one painting. And likely not that one! So, back to the easel. I still love my lucky pink cat mug. It's from Spindleworks.

Can you see the cat's face on it? At Spindleworks they do magic every day. If you live anywhere near Brunswick, Maine, I encourage you to visit. They have a new place in Hallowell, too.

Oh, the other painting? It's about done! :-)