Editing and honing

in art and in the kitchen

Bev in the studio

On the last day of our watercolour workshop, my mom sat down at the table underneath the tall, studio windows. Beside her was her white circular palette, a glass jar with clean water, a few brushes, a piece of paper towel for blotting. In the centre of the table were two bananas sitting in a speckled blue pottery bowl, stacked wine glasses, a pepper grinder, and a hydrangea blossom. We were tasked with painting what was in front of us, to not linger too long, to let the week’s instructions - the time in the studio, the exercises, the live models, the trips to museums, gardens and parks, the sketching, the conversations - to wash over us and just paint. My mom looked inside her bag, reached under her scarf, patted her pockets. Well, I’ve forgotten my glasses, she declared to the five of us. It will have to be an abstract day. 

This was the tone of our wonderful week away - experiment with joy, after coffee and a warm croissant. 

My Dad’s been nudging my mom to experiment with abstract art lately. I suppose he wants to see reality through an obscure lens - more colour, shapes and textures. Less literal depictions. 

My mom paints what she sees. When we arrived at our airbnb in Paris, she immediately opened the doors and situated herself at the table on the tiny terrace, set up her art supplies and started painting the view below - the geraniums at her feet, the iron railing, the apartments across the street, the scenes inside each window, and the people on the street, way down below. To paint tiny people she makes simple marks with her brush that look like a series of short matchsticks, then later adds heads and limbs. The first time she made these little marks my Dad looked over her shoulder and declared those lines to be his favourite work of hers to date - so paired back, so abstract! She laughed. She learned the technique on instagram. 

I too paint what’s in front of me. But as our retreat progressed, the constraints of time and weather meant that I couldn’t paint all the leaves on a tree, all the veins of a leaf or all the scenes in every window in the apartment across the street from where we were staying. Do I include the family eating dinner in the window? The woman laying out laundry on a drying rack? The fat languorous cat, stretched on a table? Or in the kitchen, do I try and capture every spear of the wild asparagus I bought at the market with their thin stalks and bushy, wheat-like tips? 

The struggle reminds me of E.B. White’s Elements of Style in which we’re told to “omit needless words” and “avoid a succession of loose sentences.” I am always writing, cutting and shaping my sentences, trying to make them tighter. Sometimes I call it honing. And as it turns out, telling stories through painting requires a sense of honing too. 

French painter Maurice Utrillo depicts church windows as rough, dark rectangles. Henri Matisse outlines the shape of a woman with a thick, dark line. Ellsworth Kelly draws a long, dangling vine with a simple black pen on paper. I saw all three works that week in Paris and loved them all for what was not included. I also ate a simple panna cotta with cherries spooned on top. The cherries had been preserved in a thick, dense syrup. The red liquid bled across the white surface the way watercolour seeps into thick paper. Just milk, gelatin, sugar and vanilla, topped with last year’s flavours of summer. 

And there we were, eating abstract art, without even realizing it.