I went and painted the Henry A. Guerra Branch Library today. I had been there before but it’s been a while and it’s in a part of town I’m not familiar with. I hardly recognized it. It was built in 2004 and I think I was there shorty after it opened. Back then it was a striking, contemporary building with low-lying plants. Now there are overgrown trees out front. I wasn’t quite sure how I was going to paint it. I’m sure the trees help a lot with the heat, but the original landscaping made the architecture stand out more.
I set up my easel by the road and was able to get a good view of the building. I always seem to be apprehensive when I’m at a library I’m unfamiliar with. And being in an unfamiliar part of town doesn’t help either. When I first started plein air painting I had no idea what I was doing. I thought I was a decent painter and had been studying painting for quite a while, but painting outside was so new, and so much more difficult. At the beginning I was happy if I could capture a likeness of the subject. I’ve got a lot of paintings that are hard to decipher. But I’m glad I kept at it. Sometimes it only takes me a bout an hour to paint an 11x14 painting and it feels so satisfying.
When I paint outdoors I’m not worrying about detail. Instead I just want to get a likeness. I try and focus on lines and value. If I can get those things right then I’m happy. The building was back lit, which wasn’t exactly what I wanted, but I made it work. It’s a pretty cool building and it will be fun to paint it bigger.
I think I’ll plein air paint again Saturday and then spend next week working in the studio. I’ve got six paintings finished and I’d like to get at least two more done before I leave fro my meditation course. If I could have ten finished paintings before I leave that would put me at ease. I’d have nineteen left to do before April. A woman who works at the library came out to look at what I was doing. She said that if the Central Branch won’t, or can’t, give me an exhibit that I should check with the individual branches and see what they can do. That was good to hear.
It’s always nice to meet other artist when I’m out painting. The library aid, Lupe, said she’s also an artist. A woman brought her grandson up to see what I was doing and he told me all about the car he had drawn that morning. A lot of people approach me and share with me that they too are artists or that they love art. A man came up to me outside San Pedro and told me his mom had gotten him into art when he was a kid but he’d lost touch with it along the way. Maybe getting outside and making art inspires people to make art also, or rekindles an old passion they had for it.
My passion was rekindled at the Musee d’Orsay in Paris in 2004. I was looking at something, and now I don’t even remember what it was, and I remembered painting in middle school. I wanted to learn how to draw as a little girl and in middle school I was introduced to acrylics. I loved it, and I loved doing something that I felt good at, but over the years I got interested in other things. I played sports and in high school I started hanging out with friends on the weekends.
When I got home from Paris I decided I would take some kind of class at San Antonio Community College (SAC) each semester to get me excited about being creative again. I also signed up for a weekend painting class at the Southwest School of Art and Craft. I spent years taking classes - drawing, painting, creative writing, photography - and eventually found that, yeah, I wanted to paint. I took classes with an artist who taught out of a studio on South Flores and another artist who taught in Beacon Hill. I spent a total of ten years studying before I felt like I was good enough to branch out on my own. I still take the occasional class, because I want to continue to improve, but now I’m a full-time artist and it’s a dream come true.