Painting practice videos

Where does detail come from?

Thinking back I doubt that I have painted more than a dozen mouths since my earliest childhood, yet this one worked relatively successfully. I remember thinking, in the studio at that time, that if I stroked the brush vertically across the lips, on top of the new paint, then perhaps there was just 'a chance' the paint might result in something like lip textures I had seen in the coffee-table-book photos, I had browsed before the session began. That was the extent of the pre-knowledge for this action, so I was pleasantly surprised when the paint dried the way it did and the lip image was revealed to its complete extent. As I painted it, the shine of the wet paint left the end product of my action both invisible and in reality at that moment, non existent until the paint dried. This emphasises that painting is not just a visual, hand and eye activity. Sometimes painting continues to take place on the canvas after the painter has departed the studio. The limit to my thinking was that of possibility, of letting go, of risk taking. This brief event demands that many of the simpler conventional ideas about how adults learn are thrown into question. I do not think I ever learned to paint a mouth. I cannot analyse the event breaking it down into competencies for painting a mouth. At best, I looked at the state of the fluid media at the point of contact between the brush and canvas and hoped it would deposit a textured pigment in roughly the right place. If I learned anything in the moments before the brush touched the canvas and the duration of the event shown in this short video clip, it was to know a feeling; a feeling that it would be OK this time, I could take a risk, I could let the brush do the work. Something in the paint was working OK. I felt comfortable believing it would probably turn out alright, and if not I would just do more, make another attempt. There was no limit to what was possible.(Reader 2007)