My brother is a cellist.  I grew up listening to him practice Bach and Dvorak and I learned to memorize the funny boo-dee-boody boody exercises that he always warmed up with.  Eventually he started teaching and I can remember-even as a young child-listening to him describe his students and how and what he taught them.  When I started teaching he would ask me: ”how do you tell your students to hold a pencil”?  Or “how do you tell them to stand”?  Questions like these never occurred to me while teaching painting or drawing and they certainly hadn’t occurred to me while making the work.  The work-oil painting-has mostly been a business of sustained effort rather than technical finesse.  It hasn’t mattered very much how I held the brush or the palette knife.  What has mattered is that I stayed with it-with the painting and the material and the surface-long enough for something decent to happen. With oil painting it’s a reasonable approach.  Oil paintings, especially those on panel, can be revived many times through sanding and reworking the surface in all kinds of ways.   Technique is not so much in the making of the original mark as it is the strategy for keeping the painting alive.  The marks that stay are not the most brilliant or inspired, they’re just the survivors.

All of this was before I started painting watercolors.  I have found watercolor painting to be a different process altogether and I’ve wondered if it isn’t more like what my brother has been talking about all these years both from the standpoint of technique and performance.  For instance, how I hold the brush turns out to be really important in watercolor painting.  Each mark with the watercolor is a signature and much harder to change and erase than oils.  The angle of the brush is more critical, the pressure on the paper, whether the brush is gripped tightly or allowed to wiggle around is important.  The brush itself matters more than oils (like a bow maybe?).  The differences between nylon and squirrel and sable are critical.  The size, shape age and handle length of the brush matter too.  Then there are the papers.  I have found that the type of paper I use in a watercolor painting is more critical than the ground and support I use with oils.    In many ways it is the subject in so far as it is absorbent or not, flat or bumpy and how these factors weave their way in and out of the form and the color.  And transparency.  How much water?  Should I add gouache?  Its not as if similar issues don’t come up in oil painting its just that they are so critical within a specific moment in watercolor painting.  If, for instance, I choose the wrong brush in an oil than I can always change my mind later.  In watercolor painting I have to be all of and in the moment and totally tuned into my brush, my wash, its relationship to this color, this space, and it all is really right now.  In this respect I think the parallel to music is not just in respect to technique but to performance as well, since the making of the watercolor is a kind of dance in itself.  If I don’t ‘perform” the piece correctly the wash will not describe the space, the balls will not turn.  Instead of a score I have my last watercolors to look at .–First the background wash, then the frisket outline, the pattern, the background to the body color of the ball then the foreground plane.  If I performed well, if I stood correctly, if I held the right brush in the right way, if several hundred moves (notes?) played out in the right order and in the right way then just maybe the painting will have a chance to work out.