02/05/2023
During the Christmas holiday my wife surprised the family with an afternoon of painting. I’m no stranger to having a paint brush in my hand. My dad was a chemist for Glidden paint and I literally started painting walls and windows when I was 5 years old. B
But this wasn’t a typical “sip and paint” event-we jumped right into the deep end painting with oils on a blank canvas.
We met in the artist’s studio, with the instruction to paint what we heard in the music that was playing. I started with an open mind and planned to have some fun. I selected a color palette, then realized how quickly the colors can turn to brown when you mix them. I felt completely out of my element, and then she quickly announced that we had about an hour left. All that I had to show was a yellow circle on the top left with a narrow band of greenish color through the middle.
My daughter was already on to her second canvas, and I felt panic begin to creep in- I know, it’s only a 12 x 12 canvas and there’s literally nothing to panic over. Still, I had this sense wash over me that I wasn’t going to be able to do this. The inner voices were telling me that I’m not creative and to give up and walk away. Who did I think I was anyway?
Then I remembered the instructions from the artist.
Nothing you paint is wrong.
Anything you don’t like you can paint over.
Fill up the canvas.
I was able to coach myself through the “panic” and (mostly) fill the canvas. In the process I learned that we can be triggered into emotional responses by events you would never expect, and that our inner dialog during those moments is critical to the potential outcome.
Some recent research also helped me to understand more about how our brain works- “The study, published in the journal NeuroImage and funded by a grant from the National Science Foundation, shows that creativity is, in fact, driven primarily by the right hemisphere in musicians who are comparatively inexperienced at improvisation. However, musicians who are highly experienced at improvisation rely primarily on their left hemisphere. This suggests that creativity is a "right-brain ability" when a person deals with an unfamiliar situation but that creativity draws on well-learned, left-hemisphere routines when a person is experienced at the task.”
So it would seem that the process of learning anything new will engage the right hemisphere, and as we become more accomplished at the skill it will engage our left hemisphere.
While I’m not going to be mistaken for Van Gogh or even Bob Ross, I was able to create something that I like simply by following the process. I rotated the painting and moved the sun to the top right and just added vibrant colors to the top. My wife is excited because I learned to enjoy painting, which she loves to do, and I know that in the process I am exercising brain areas that I haven’t used much lately.
What new activities are you learning?
