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Copyright © 2022 by Sara Woster

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ISBN (hardcover) 9780593329948

ISBN (ebook) 9780593329955

Cover design and lettering: Linet Huamán Velásquez

Cover art: Painting by Sara Woster

Book design by Lorie Pagnozzi, adapted for ebook by Kelly Brennan

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TO R., FOR SHARING YOUR MOONLIGHT

Contents

INTRODUCTION

CHAPTER ONE: The Art Store

CHAPTER TWO: Color Wheel/Mixing Paints

CHAPTER THREE: Shapes & Color

CHAPTER FOUR: Filling the Space

CHAPTER FIVE: Light & Shadow

CHAPTER SIX: Warm & Cool Colors

CHAPTER SEVEN: Learning to Observe

CHAPTER EIGHT: Painting Your Arcadia

CHAPTER NINE: Painting the Figure

CHAPTER TEN: Telling a Story

CHAPTER ELEVEN: Nocturne

CHAPTER TWELVE: Making Decisions

CHAPTER THIRTEEN: Arbitrary Colors

CHAPTER FOURTEEN: Interiors

CHAPTER FIFTEEN: Symbolism & Still Life

CHAPTER SIXTEEN: What Makes a Painting Great?

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN: How to Be an Artist

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

RESOURCES

INDEX

INTRODUCTION

My 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 Eakins’s 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. It’s a shame that he didn’t discover it earlier.

You don’t 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 Jake’s 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 he’d 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 don’t want to slog through repetitive exercises or copy other people’s 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 don’t 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 up—most 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’ silhouettes—the 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 can’t 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.

What I hadn’t expected was how quickly new friendships would develop from the class. Some of my friends knew each other a little, and some had never met because they were from different areas of my life. But soon people were forming new friendships and connecting outside of class, bound together by their newfound love of painting. And maybe, in this terribly lonely world—a world so lonely that Japan just created a Minister of Loneliness cabinet position—the most important thing learning to paint does is build community. All art brings other artists into your life—just look at the communities that build up around cosplay or gospel choirs or quilting bees or photography clubs. And those artist friends are important. They are the people who will remind you of all the reasons that the world is better with you here because they are the people sensitive enough to notice when you need a reminder.

Art can be transformative in so many ways like that. Painting offers the potential to outpace your own expectations of yourself, to try to perfect something. It is a way to be mindful without having to do the dreadful downward dog. And in learning to paint, you might end up simply doing the powerful act of making something beautiful that you can gift to someone else.

Making art and looking at art can improve the world by improving us. The artwork I truly love increases my empathy. Great art emits such a strong light that it helps us see the world with more clarity, something like what Henri Matisse called illuminating the fog that surrounds us.

If nothing else, your own world will be illuminated through painting. After reading this book, you will notice things you didn’t notice before. After the chapter about the color wheel teaches you that red and green are complementary colors that vibrate when located next to each other, you never again will ignore the red rose next to its green stem. The light and shadow chapter, where you learn that different light sources create different types of shadows, will have you noticing the starkness of the shadow that your bedside lamp casts under a mug of tea. Doing the exercises on painting the human figure will have you observing the slouch of every man on the subway, the posture of every young girl walking into a ballet school. The chapter where we paint our interiors will make you reconsider the objects in your room and the moments that you live in those rooms in a new, poetic way. Learning how to paint a flower by observing its stem’s specific bend will train you to notice the nuances in the natural world. The chapter on symbolism will force you to think about what matters to you and what objects best symbolize those important things.

Yes, in this book you will learn how to do important technical things like mix paint and map out the correct proportions of a human face, but I hope it teaches you more than that. I hope it helps you learn to live like an artist by becoming hyper aware of the world and your role in it. The writer Zadie Smith has said that she writes so as not to sleepwalk through her life.

Or maybe you should paint because you are a sad person trying to thrive in a world that makes it clear, in so many ways, how much it kind of despises sad people. Painting saves me all the time by transforming my bad emotions into something less bad.

Georges Braque more eloquently said, Art is a wound turned into light.

I titled this book Painting Can Save Your Life in reference to all these important ways that painting can help save a person from loneliness and apathy and the impact of all the stresses we face each day. And I called it that because art can save you by making it easier to do the brave, difficult work of staying hopeful and engaged with the world throughout, as Mary Oliver said, our one wild and precious life.

chapter one

THE ART STORE

When I was growing up in Sioux Falls, South Dakota, in the 1980s, people were optimistic and tough. They valued stoicism and fiscal restraint, and the hard streak of libertarianism running through the state meant that you didn’t have to wear a seat belt and nobody cared what went on in your bedroom. The local government supported the arts and made sure that the Parks and Rec department was well funded. It was a great place to live if you didn’t mind the humidity. And except for that humidity, there was no complaining because it was the belief of most South Dakotans that unless your whining was coming from an iron lung, you had nothing to complain about.

I had even less to complain about than most. I lived in the world’s greatest neighborhood on South Sixth Avenue with a pack of free-range kids to bike with every day and play kick the can with every night. Most of us lived in small, one-story houses. Nobody on our block had any extra money, but the houses and yards were well tended.

My parents were good at parenting and not into spanking. My father is charming, gentle, and musical, with a hot temper that emerges in the car. A local celebrity, he gave the cattle reports on KELO-Land television and hosted any number of pie contests, FFA banquets, and, starting when I was thirteen, his own weekly variety show. My mom, a former high school teacher turned librarian, is cerebral, unflappable, and tireless. She came up with fun projects for us to do on hot summer days and cooked amazing meals, which we ate promptly at 5:30 every night. I was the only person who did not think that my sister was perfect; her tendency to physically assault me if I wore a pair of her jeans prevented me from sharing that citywide opinion. My brother was not interested in me enough to bother me; he was too busy hiding in his basement bedroom listening to Steve Martin and Richard Pryor albums, writing short stories for horror magazines, and practicing big band songs on his sax.

Our house was just large enough for everybody to have their own small bedroom, and in our backyard, a chain-link fence held a cockapoo, a weeping willow, and a vegetable garden. There was no need for a security system; my dad left his car keys in the ignition of his car at night. I didn’t know danger unless it was coming from a weather pattern.

But even if we did have problems, it isn’t like we would talk about them. As my father likes to say, Don’t tell people your problems. Fifty percent don’t care, twenty percent do, and the rest are glad it’s happening to you.

So what do you do in that world of no complaints and glaring optimism when your range of emotions veered to the left as everybody else veered right? When you were labeled moody from an early age, struggled to leave your mother’s side, and had panic attacks when getting your hair washed at the hairdresser. The kind of kid who, on the first day of kindergarten, when your mother told you not to touch the hot burner that just held her coffee pot, you pressed your soft, five-year-old palm onto the red-hot coils. And when you were rushed into basements during tornado warnings and the rest of your family calmly played Sorry and Clue and waited for the weather to pass, you hid beneath a pile of wheat-smelling stuffed animals and waited to die. What do you do when you have both insomnia and a bottle of Mylanta in the seventh grade?

For a while, I dealt with my dialed-up emotions and overactive senses by suspending myself in my imagination and books. I had imaginary friends long beyond the time that it is acceptable to interact with invisible people. I was the last to give up on Barbies. I made little friends out of pom-poms and brought them to Catechism class, where I set them on