Sara Woster - Painting Can Save Your Life : How and Why We Paint

M y journey from painter to painting teacher began because my daughter is a solid first baser. Her flexible, long limbs, a rabid competitive streak, and her unflappable nature allow her to catch most balls that come her way and remain unphased by opponents racing across first. As a result, much of our social life in the spring revolves around her games and the families of the other players.

After one game we went for pizza at the house of Jake and Jodi, a good-looking, high-energy couple with a passion for saving the planet and a daughter who pitches on the Brooklyn Bombers. It was my first visit to their house, and I noticed many beautiful paintings, all uniform in size and using a palette that reminded me of Thomas Eakinss oceanscapes, lining the dining room on a picture shelf.

Who painted these? I asked them.

My father-in-law painted them, Jodi told me. He had never painted in his life before he wound up in an assisted-living facility that had an arts program. He loved it. Its a shame that he didnt discover it earlier.

You dont make paintings that beautiful without having been born to paint. The fact that he only discovered his talent at the end of his life kind of broke my heart.

And the larger impact of an absence of arts opportunities is something I started thinking about a lot. Kids obviously need to make art, but so do isolated seniors and new mothers suddenly at home. Men and women working jobs they hate who return home to spend the night trying to find a way to feel better should be making art as well. Recently retired men and women who are looking for a new focus for their sudden excess of time and people who are neurodiverse or dealing with mental health issues should be making art, too. Even Jakes father, who had a wonderful family and a purposeful life without painting, might have made new and different friends or found a stress relief tool if hed found painting earlier.

Without any real idea of what I would do with it, I began plotting a simple painting method with a steep success curve so that people who might fall in love with painting would uncover that fact quickly, before frustration set in and they gave up.

I had to figure out how to make the exercises meaningful to each individual painter; for people to stay interested, they would have to make paintings that mattered to them from the onset. People dont want to slog through repetitive exercises or copy other peoples paintings, having the colors and compositions dictated to them, which is the method some how-to painting books and methods employ.

My goal was to create an easily accessible portal to painting. A method to get somebody started and give them enough confidence so that they could then continue with in-person classes at a local arts center or community college, seek out other books that explore specific types of painting, or find a local painting group. I would not attempt to re-create the college-level experience some of my friends give their lucky college students; instead, I wanted to instill a love of painting and a confidence in basic painting skills in people who dont have the time or the money to dedicate themselves full-time to learning to paint.

But once I had a firm layout of the method, I was terrified of saying that I wanted to actually use it to teach anybody. Who was I to teach anybody anything? Yes, I had twenty-five years of dedicated painting behind me, and as many years of obsessively looking at art, but I had no teaching degree, no MFA. I was scared to say publically that I thought I knew enough about this very hard thing to pass it on to others.

Luckily, my belief in my ability to teach people how to paint was stronger than my fear of people making fun of my desire to teach painting. One day I hit send on an email announcing the first class of my tiny painting school, named The Painting School, and just like that I became a painting teacher.

The adult classes were held in an upstairs gallery space above a coffee shop. I arrived with small tabletop easels, canvases, and whatever we needed to do each exercise, whether that be toy dinosaurs or Styrofoam cones. Somebody always brought wine.

I had been surprised by how many of the people who responded to my initial class offering were friends of mine who had never expressed any interest in learning how to paint. I was less surprised that only women signed upmost of whom had big jobs. I was honored that these women arrived to paint after an intense day of work preceded and followed by childcare.

During that first class, everybody seemed both excited and a little nervous. I told them all to pick an easel and get out the paints they had purchased in advance. I laid out a pile of fruit and objects like a baseball, a high-heeled shoe, and toy cars. We set out to learn how to paint those objects silhouettesthe same exercises we do in Chapter Three of this book.

All of my painting classes, whether for kids or adults, are designed to be fun, even while we are learning the foundational elements like color mixing, composition, and the ratios of the human body. For a class on painting animals, we built a ridiculous still life full of stuffed animals, ceramic dogs, and a taxidermy squirrel. For the observation class, I brought in piles of flowers and let the artists build their own bouquets to paint.

My classes for kids are even more fun. For a class on painting an outer space scene, I blasted the music from Star Wars as the students filled their painted skies with celestial shapes never before seen by astronomers. For a class inspired by Wayne Thiebaud, I brought in a massive variety of mini cakes, which we ate after painting them. For color mixing, I brought in a hundred different house paint swatches from a hardware store and split the kids into teams. They collectively tried to mix and match as many of the swatches as possible in a half-hour period.

I treat all of my students, whether adults or children, not as dabblers, but as artists. At the end of the six-week class period, I brought in an artist to do a critique of their work, the kind they might have endured in art school. I took my class to museum shows to look at paintings with the new lens that learning to paint had given them. The impact of the classes on the new painters ability to look at art cant be overstated. When they looked at a show of Grant Wood paintings at the Whitney Museum of American Art, they no longer saw a bunch of beautiful paintings; they saw the perspective tricks, warm and cool color choices, and symbolism that came together to make each painting.