Verditer forever! (Day 1 Maine Watercolor Class)

My feet are touching the earth again after being home from Maine a couple of weeks.

But Maine....the light, the sun blazing on the white buildings, the ocean, the Wyeth paintings, and Andrew Wyeth's haunts, the smell of pine trees, the varied colors on wooden houses, clean air, no traffic, and lobstah.

On the drive up I stopped in Connecticut to get Verditer blue paint that I could not find before I left. I had found the store on line and it was right on my path. Now I had everything on the supplies list.

This was a "Master Class". I never did ask what that meant, but I think most of the class members had been painting for many years. I told them it had been 35 years since I had painted. One woman said welcome back.

The first morning in the rain we met at David Dewey's house in downtown Owl's Head. He had tarpaulins drawn over a table behind the house and we crowded in. Some were wiping off plastic chairs. It was a tiny space for the 19 of us. Surprise. All of the attendees were my age or older except Stephan, age 33, our cutie pie from France who illustrates for Disney and has a Russell Crowe look about him.

David is talking to those who are already there and seems a little disorganized but we get into the official orientation somehow. Then he does a painting demonstration.
His pallet is a butcher's tray and it's dirty. He wipes off the middle with a dirty sponge but it comes clean. Then he starts painting. He's talking about building a painting from the bottom up as compared to building a building from the ground up. I take notes. We all have folders with our names on them. There are maps of Rockland and the various sites at which we will paint. There are a couple pages with color information, one that shows where to put which color on the palette and a chart with grays created by blending colors and a page with landscape colors. I don't know the names of the colors yet.

He talks constantly while he is painting. No, not mumbling to himself, no. Information is pouring out. Once in a while he says something that is beyond me, but I don't mind. I'm so happy to be there and I can't wait to get into my paints.

We got directions to our first site and the rain stopped. By the time I got my lunch and got to the site, several classmates were already painting. I didn't know what to paint. I found some old boats by the water and sat down. It took me a long time to unwrap my new painting board, my palette, and I even had to go find the bathroom to wash the stiffness out of my new brushes. When David came by I was just squeezing the paints onto my palette according to his chart. Good, he said, you're not using those little palette indentations. I'm sure I made apologetic statements about not being good enough to be in this class but I was happy. He does not tolerate any sort of self abasement, and always finds something encouraging to say. He is gifted that way.

He came by later and I didn't want him to look at my picture. It looked pretty much like mud on mud to me, but, no, he said it was intelligent. I said I don't have the skills yet, but I'm just trying to do what you were telling us to do with the shapes and values. He made two sketches of similar scenes right there, teaching me as he painted about composition. I can't remember learning a single thing about composition in art school.

At the end of each day we met and put our paintings up and he verbalized what was good about each one... When I saw the line-up, I saw real paintings, by real painters. I didn't want to put mine up. I suppose I was embarrassed and wondered for a moment what they thought when they saw my mudpie, but I didn't care. I was there to learn and maybe I could get a most improved award at the end of the week. Ha. Again the words pour out of him. He is extremely verbal and has a lot of good words in his collection. I'm drinking it all in.

I stayed past dark the first night. Back in Bath I go right to bed, but I sit in bed and paint a sketch of the refinery I saw on the way home, a dark tower against a dark sky with lights on it. I dream and everything I see in my dream is a potential painting.