painting club

So I've started a mini oil painting class at home.

Made up of three enthusiastic mothers looking to harness their painting genes, and keen to dabble their week's stress away.

My qualifications? Only the few semesters' worth of painting classes and holiday-time painting with Joan Kelly, some of the happiest times I had in art school. They were the times I really felt like I liked ADM. They were the times I really felt like an artist, what with the airy painting studio, large easels, and my stained apron.

And I remember the first lesson she taught: how to see. How to see the many subtle colours on a white object. How to see light and shadow, how to tell yellow light from blue light. Painting class switched my view of the world from 8-bit VGA colour to billions and billions of colours.

It's been fun, buying more easels, buying starter kits, setting up.

And today, Lesson 3, was spent across the road at the lake for nature painting. Not my favourite painting genre. But you never feel like an artist until you're setting up your easel by a lake like they do in your imagination of Austen-time artists.