MikeLigalig.com

I'm a frustrated artist. And an untalented one
BRENDA MCMILLAN
The Globe and Mail


I've always bought homes that were fixer-uppers. While I rely on friends and handy partners to do most of the hard work, I take on the painting and am proud of the walls, ceilings, floors and doors that have been transformed by the slap of my roller and tickle of my paintbrush. I've turned some ugly ducklings into swans in my day, but lately, I've picked up a brush to overhaul something else - me.

For a long time, I've been nursing a restlessness, a quiet yearning. It flares when I'm travelling and makes me feel itchy (no, it's not bed bugs). When I see vineyards in the Douro, a Santorini sunrise or a petit garçon in Paris lugging a baguette as tall as he is, I pull out my camera but what I really long to do is whip out a sketchbook and draw, then paint, what I see. I am a frustrated artist. And, unfortunately, an untalented one.

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We started by stretching primed canvas across the frame and stapling it securely. It was a huge, white question mark of possibility that was both intimidating and challenging. I was instantly nervous looking at the array of paintbrushes and tubes and tubs of acrylic paint. What did I know about any of this?

Partner dearest assured me that the project was meant to be fun, not stressful, and unlike writing (my profession) with its structure and rules, painting was a purely creative process. Uh-huh. It felt like Leonardo da Vinci was trusting me with painting the bits around the Mona Lisa.

He sketched in the dancer, then the background buildings with their varied roof lines and windows. When he was finished, the white canvas was a road map of intersecting lines that looked like the kind of paint-by-numbers project I loved as a child. I was heartened. All I had to do was paint inside the lines with the colours he mixed up for me.

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When I put down my pen for the day, I was ready to play painting again. While he mixed up the periwinkle for the cathedral walls and tower, I looked at my photos from Spain and was horrified to see that some small tower details were wrong. I quickly changed the pencil lines to make them accurate then picked up my brush.

Hours passed. Only the fact that I was starving made me put down my paintbrush and pick up a pot, a pattern that was repeated many times over the next 12 weeks. I stopped watching television, barely got through my book club selections and spent weekends working on the canvas rather than renovating the bathroom, doing laundry or working on my novel. I was infatuated.

Painting the buildings in muted browns, greys, greens and blues was like constructing a town, house by house. On one, I decided that the windows needed a little something extra, so I altered the lines to give them Moorish arches that echoed the shape of the dancer's arms over her head. She was coming to life under my partner's brush. Her dress, a mass of flouncing lemons and oranges, shimmered and shone against my subtle background. She watched us, smiling softly.

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