A few weeks ago I posted about my ongoing attempt to learn to draw and to paint, with watercolours. This isn’t only about creating ‘art’, painting is also a new way to help me deal with some of the symptoms caused by my rare disease. Learning to paint is a challenge, but also a lot of fun. First, the challenges.
Part of the challenge is that my right hand and lower arm are affected by Complex Regional Pain Syndrome (CRPS), which often makes it impossible to hold a paint brush properly. All of the joints in my fingers, as well as my wrist, can stiffen up almost completely. Instead of holding a paint brush the usual way, I’ll often grasp it between my thumb and the side of my palm, balancing the handle of the brush on the web of my thumb.
At other times my hand might start to twitch uncontrollably, so I don’t even try to paint then. My approach is a kind of ‘do it when you can’ philosophy ‘-) Maybe someday I’ll decide to see what happens if I do try to paint while my hand is twitching, but for now all I can imagine is the mess I’d make – spattering paint everywhere! Who knows, it might end up a whole new abstract style of painting that I could try someday… but not right now.
The other major challenge, for me, is the mild cognitive impairment (MCI) with which I share my life. Also due to CRPS, the MCI is highly unpredictable. You wouldn’t think this would be so much of a problem with art, but it really is. Sometimes I’ll be in the middle of a painting and I’ll forget which colours I need to mix to get green (blue and yellow). That might not be so bad if I had chosen to use acrylic or oil paints, because those dry fairly slowly.
Watercolour paints, on the other hand, dry so quickly that you don’t really have time to stop and check something online while you’re painting. And if you do try to put another paint colour over one you’ve already put down, you’ll usually ruin your entire painting – the watercolour pigments aren’t layered in the same way as oils or even pastels.
To me, painting with watercolours is a bit like painting against the clock; if you’re using the wet-on-wet technique that I prefer, you only have the time it takes until the cotton ‘paper’ dries. All you can add after the surface has dried are small finishing details, like individual blades of grass in the foreground of a field. If you try to add in a barn or other building, or even a tree, after the cotton has dried, it will look almost like a collage – like something has been glued on top of the painting. Some artists actually do that, but it’s not the look that I’m hoping for.
The other CRPS-related challenges of painting are the same as for daily life. These include high-impact (severe) chronic pain, both joint pain and neuropathic or nerve pain, episodes of full-body fatigue, and more. I know, it seems like such a bizarre constellation of symptoms! That’s because CRPS is both an autoimmune disease and a neuro-inflammatory condition. Some researchers and physicians have tried to combine that into the term neuroautoinflammatory, but it hasn’t caught on:
Both the autoimmune and the autoinflammatory components of CRPS appear to be regulated by neuropeptide-containing peripheral nerve fibers and the sympathetic nervous system.
While CRPS displays a complex neuroimmunological pathogenesis, therapeutic interventions could be designed targeting autoinflammation, autoimmunity, or the neural support for these phenomena.” (1)
Okay, enough with the challenges – let’s get to the fun parts of painting! The subjects that attract me, to paint, are the same that I’ve been photographing for years; landscapes and nature. Landscape painters can work, in broad terms, in two ways; “in studio” or “en plein air”.
You don’t need an actual artists’ studio, though, because painting “in studio” usually just means painting indoors. My “in studio” setting, for example, is my dining room table! That’s where I paint when it’s raining or snowing, or if the weather is horrible. When the weather is good, though, I prefer “plein air” painting. The phrase “en plein air” comes from the French term for “in the outdoors”, which was popularized by impressionist artists like Claude Monet.
Painting in the open air is recorded as far back as the Renaissance, but it was generally done in preparation for studio painting; only in the nineteenth century, through the cumulative efforts of artists such as John Constable, Camille Corot, and Claude Monet, did painting en plein air come to stand for the ethos of modernity and fidelity to nature which it still implies.
More than any other movement, it was Impressionism that became synonymous with open air painting, which is thus also associated with the attention to light and atmosphere that defined that school.
Today, en plein air painting, once considered an odd affectation, is what much of the public pictures when they imagine an artist at work, and is favored by many semi-professional and amateur artists.” (2)
Most of the scenes I want to paint are places best accessed by bicycle, so back in May I decided to see whether I could pack all of my painting supplies into a bike-pack. I was actually quite surprised that it worked, and that I was able to use my bike as an easel. Since then, I’ve painted several times during rest stops on my bike rides, often along the lakes or rivers in my area.
Montreal is an island city, so we’re literally surrounded by water. My home is about a 10-minute bike ride from a small river leading to a lake, and then another 10 minutes to the lake itself. In June I participated in a group plein-air painting event, with mandatory masks, on the banks of a historic canal close to the downtown core of the city. I’ll post about that another day; I keep forgetting (the MCI rearing its ugly head, again!).
Today I thought it would be fun to share some photos of my bike-as-easel set-up. This one is from a 35 km (22 mile ride) this morning, with about an hour and a half of drawing and painting on location. I should mention that I draw slowly, because of my CRPS-affected right hand and arm, and also because I’m still a beginner with both painting and drawing.
As a beginner, I’m not comfortable starting a landscape painting without sketching it out first – I tend to do a small drawing first, as practice, and then draw the outlines of the scene onto my watercolor cotton-paper to try to get the scale – the relative sizes of the objects – right. If a tree and a flower are side-by-side in a scene, for example, you probably don’t want them to be the same size in your painting!
How have I set my bike up for this? It helps that I already had a rectangular bike-pack, on a metal rack over my rear wheel, with 2 zipped pockets on each side of the pack. After propping my bicycle up against a tree or a large rock, I take out a piece of cotton-paper taped to a corrugated plastic board, and balance that on the top of my bike-pack. If it’s windy, I use 4 large metal bulldog clips to attach the ridig cotton surface to the thin bungee-cord style elastics that criss-cross the top of my bike-pack (to carry larger items on top of the pack; that’s how I pack my painting gear).
My small water container, to mix into my dried paints, also goes on top of the bike pack and I wedge it slightly under the saddle of my bike. My metal container of dried paints folds out, like a 3-part flyer or brochure, so I can use the side panels to mix paint colours. This palette is made specifically for plein air painting, and has a metal loop underneath so you can hook the whole thing onto a finger or thumb if you want to hold it in one hand. It also holds 3 small travel-size paint brushes.
So far I haven’t used the palette that way; I balance it on the saddle of my bike. At a garden supply centre I found a great little “gardeners pocket”, with a top tab that’s meant to snap closed over a belt. I snap that over the strap of my bike pack and pull it to the side where I’m standing to paint. It holds a couple of pencils, a tube eraser, a small ruler, and a toothbrush that I sometimes use kind of like a paintbrush. If I bring longer brushes, I’ll keep them in this pocket after I unpack them.
What else do I bring with me? My bike-pack always has a first-aid kit, extra sunscreen, insect repellent, handi-wipes, cycling snacks, chewing gum, and Hotshots hand-warmers in case the neuropathic frostbite-like pain flares up in my hand – even when it’s 100F+! These days I also carry a purse-size bottle of hand sanitizer, and a face mask; useful when strangers come up close to ask what I’m painting! Even though I’ve had both doses of COVID-19 vaccine, I don’t want to take any chances because of the autoimmune component of my CRPS).
And that’s about it. All of my plein air watercolour supplies fit into a little travel bag that fits onto the top of my bike pack, so these days I almost always bring it with me – unless I only have time for a short ride. I have a larger palette that I use at home, or should I say “in studio”, and quite a few paint brushes. But when I’m painting outside I try to really pare down my supplies to the bare minimum; that’s a challenge, but it’s a fun challenge!
Whatever challenges you’re facing these days, I hope some of them are fun challenges. If not, then I wish you the grace and strength to get through them – as quickly as possible. So much has been written about the difficulties caused by the pandemic, by physical distancing, by remote learning, and all the rest, that I wanted to share something positive that has come out of this strange period.
I began learning to paint – and then to draw – at the end of January, while Montreal was still in lockdown. I could only take online courses, and had to make do with whatever supplies I could order online. There were even shortages of art materials, during our lockdown. But overall, it has been a truly positive experience, one that will hopefully continue for years to come.
Thanks so much for stopping by, as always. Feel free to reach out over on Instagram or Twitter, because the comments section of this blog has been disabled. With my cognitive impairment, managing the comments is just too much for me. Stay safe, and keep well.
References
(1) Autoinflammatory and autoimmune contributions to complex regional pain syndrome. David Clark J, Tawfik VL, Tajerian M, Kingery WS. Molecular Pain. 2018. Online: doi:10.1177/1744806918799127. Accessed 05 Aug 2021:
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/1744806918799127
(2) En Plein Air Definition Overview and Analysis. [Internet]. 2021. TheArtStory.org. Content compiled and written by Rebecca Seiferle for The Art Story Foundation. Edited and revised by Greg Thomas. First published 22 Nov 2020. Updated and modified regularly. Accessed 05 Aug 2021:
https://www.theartstory.org/definition/en-plein-air/