On Watercolor and Perfectionism

Last summer I decided to take up painting again. This marked my second foray into the medium, following a stint with oil and acrylic toward the end of my twenties, a period when I had mostly stopped writing and thought maybe I wasn't meant to be a writer and that I should probably think about doing something else with my time. Like paint.

Part of what motivated me to try again was John Lurie’s show on HBO, “Painting with John”, which I first put on in May on an idle whim, blocked toward the far edge of spring. I found myself watching an older guy with prominent eyebrows as he piloted a drone around a tropical property (I’ve since learned is the Caribbean), then losing the drone in the jungle underbrush, rambling idly, and then painting with watercolor in a darkened room, the windows covered over with black sheets as jazz played in the background, the occasional odd comment serving as accompaniment from the painter, John: “Bob Ross was wrong. Everybody can’t paint. It’s not true.”

My first impression: here was a special kind of art hermit. Which happens to be some of my favorite types of people. I kept watching.

I didn’t recognize him at first, by name or face, but after a few episodes it dawned on me that this was John Lurie, of Jim Jarmusch’s ‘Down By Law’ and ‘Stranger than Paradise,’ two of my favorite movies from a favorite director. John Lurie half a lifetime later, now a painter, I discovered, a musician, actor, cancer survivor, and all-around artist. I had missed the connection. 

From there it didn’t take many episodes before I was convinced this was among the best shows I’d seen in recent memory, and eventually one of my all-around favorites for its free-form creative spirit. Produced bare-bones, the show has an original and undiluted voice that's rare in television – and is unmistakably John’s, who gives it an auteur feeling at pretty much every layer of production. Where he seems to have been involved in almost every step and HBO essentially allowed him to stream at what I imagine was an unusually low cost. Although they eventually gave John and his small team a modest amount of money, which he seemed to largely spend on making music in New York (I’ve since learned the show is ending after 3 seasons, and I am adding this sentence after the fact.)

Bamboo Houseplant (watercolor on paper, 2023)

It wasn’t long after starting the show that I went out and bought some basic watercolor supplies from the local art store. I wanted to learn watercolor. And I wanted to paint with John.

I decided to start small and began by painting houseplants, leaves, and branches I gathered while walking, along with fruits and flowers that came through our apartment. Subjects that were familiar, transient, and relatively simple – this after having made the mistake of moving too quickly past fundamentals before when I tried oil painting at the age of 27.

Besides watching John, I also spent time looking at Ellsworth Kelly’s plant drawings and paintings, some from that series directly inspiring the paintings pictured here – my own modest attempts. I was familiar with Kelly's work, having seen images of his paintings online for years and in museums like the SF MoMA, but I happened on him again in the spring in a new way. Kelly is known primarily for his work as an abstract artist. Of clean, sleek shapes, vivid undiluted colors, and sculptural paintings that hover on walls like serene elliptical visions reminiscent of images from something like 2001: A Space Odyssey.

There’s an otherworldly beauty to his work, a sense of seamless cosmic harmony. Yet when I look at many of his images, they strike me as both extraordinarily fundamental and deeply personal. A kind of art that strips the image to the raw bones of aesthetic information yet preserves a personality within the abstraction and execution of form through experience.

House Plant #4 (watercolor on paper, 2023)

This time it was his drawings and paintings of plants and flowers that I encountered while browsing online that drew me in. In part again for their simplicity, and then the feeling that maybe I could learn from them. A kind of I can too moment corresponding with John Lurie’s show, something to be seized on if you’re fortunate enough to experience that fleeting feeling.

Of Ellsworth’s drawings and paintings, mostly of flowers, fruits, common plants and leaves, I admired the cleanliness of execution and the attention to the most basic kinds of details. And then the idiosyncrasy within the lines, shapes, and colors which lend the drawings and paintings form and keep them from being rote or easily replicable. Yet the drawings often seemed relaxed and almost childlike, even haphazard in their playfulness, while not abandoning the feeling of composition or style which is often mysterious in art and separates them from numerous similar imagery. Especially in this age of increasing automation, where imagery saturates daily life and an AI generator can synthesize thousands of pictures of plants in the span of a human heartbeat. Posing the question most of us have considered in recent days: how does that power measure against the value of a human life, or of an art experience?

But like some of, say, Matisse’s drawings, there is a deceptive simplicity to the work that is rooted in a mastery of the most basic fundamentals and executed within an assurance deeply rooted in personality. Done again and again by a hand, a singular mind. Which in painting is inseparable from the body and the nervous system and the personal experience between the material and the artist who mediates the interaction of energy, motion, material, and concept. A process that can be mimicked or narrativized. But with physical painting, the actual performance still belongs to the artist. To the life.

Three Oranges and Knife (Watercolor on paper, 2023)

My sense after the summer, approaching the painting in different ways as the weeks progressed, is that watercolor in particular resists the urge to control andintellectualize and favors impressions, loose gestures, ease, and presence of mind. The way the paint applies and intermingles with the material -- water, paper (surface), pigment, and brush -- the water often gives the paint as much life as the intention or the motion implied, often with a level of happenstance benefiting the composition.

If you press or rework enough the paper gives. Literally frays apart. This happened to me more than once, even with quality paper. The paint can reach a level of density but it doesn't layer or thicken the way acrylic or oil does. The more paint you apply the more paper you lose behind the paint, which in watercolor can function effectively as light. And because you’re working with raw material, it can’t be parsed or sliced apart like language or pixels in a piece of software, which can be subject to continuous editorial action at any given moment. Often to a detriment.

For those who suffer from perfectionism or have trouble relaxing control of their creative work (I've experienced both), it can be an effective treatment in that it nudges action into the present and rewards those actions when the paint is somewhere between relaxed and decisive. Or when you listen to the composition rather than force your way through or hesitate to act.

Summer Peaches (watercolor on paper, 2023)

The paintings shared here are some of those I painted over the summer between June and July when my expectations were at their lowest. An attitude I find conducive to keeping joy in art, or anything I do, but I also find is easy to lose and something I find I have to work consistently to maintain, especially as investment begins to breed a higher degree of expectation. In that spirit I think they’re worth sharing, regardless of their quality. And then, not for the first time, I found painting offered me a way through what has felt like creative and writing-induced aphasia, back toward a means of expression that is in some ways more immediate, present, and fundamentally tangible.