Patience, It’s Worth It!

“How are you so patient? How can you be so careful? How are you not annoyed right now?” are some common questions I’m often asked, when I start working on my paintings. Well, you may ponder why I am confronted with such questions. How can the act of painting be an annoying activity? … Or what does she do to make it annoying? must be some burning questions popping up in your head right now, isn’t it so dear reader? :)

Since my early days in school, a time where I had to travel in a van at 6.00 am, dressed in the box pleated white uniform, black Clark-shoes and purple tie, I’ve always developed a fondness to dabble in paints and colours. The way a simple drop of water can create a cascade of shades in one brush stroke was always a sight that never bored me. The way I was able to recreate my imagined scenarios and scenes of the busy market, a day at the beach, an evening sunset or simply a moment of childhood happiness at the playground, with expressions, movements and colour, were always a source of much internal satisfaction and pure joy as a novice painter.

Yet unfortunately, as much as I loved the paints and the colours, sometimes I think they might not have loved me as much. Well reader, if you’re thinking why, then the answer is that I was quite terrible at drawing people and their emotions. Although, I would like to think I always had imagined beautiful scenarios, I always noticed a gap in my skill to translate that same image into a physical recreation. Even though, designing and the cultivation of artistic patterns came naturally to me, I could not muster the same skill when drawing fellow human beings. It was not just I who noticed this weakness, but my art teachers would constantly complain of my two-dimensional people, with their cartoon expressions.

Fast forward to my final years in school, where I proudly trotted around in my long senior-tie, I discovered that I was not completely terrible in my artistic endeavours, and that I had a certain painting skill not many others had. And this unconventional ability that I discovered, that defined my capability as a painter was my patience. My patience married perfectly the art of pointillism my artistic educators bequeathed upon us in our final years in school. Pointillism can be simply understood as the art of painting with dots. As we all have heard the famous words, that an ocean is formed from a multitude of tiny droplets of water, so was a pointillism painting formed with an innumerable array of dots by a simple pen (of which the Atlas chooty black gel pen was my choice), that revealed the artist’s hidden image in an unconventional way. This unusual style became my output of creativity and imagination.

Tok… tok… tok… said my pen as it scratched the surface of the canvass, while my mother uttered in the next room “There… she’s up and working again… been almost a month neh?”. Yes reader, now you can imagine why I’m constantly faced with a recurrent question “How aren’t you annoyed right now?” as a pointillist painting of a considerable size would take up weeks to finish, according to my experience I should add. Although, the basic image is already drawn upon the canvass to guide the rest of the creation, each dot needs careful calculation and precise positioning to fit the image. From a cluster of dots that are subsequently shaded to a few scatterings, each dot commands respect in placing it perfectly. Slow… slow… weeks go by of tok… tok… tok… in the morning, tok… tok… tok… in the afternoon and tok… tok… tok… in the night. I bet reading this sentence itself annoyed you, didn’t it reader? XD. I must admit, I myself undergo certain moments of temper tantrums when faced with technical difficulties of pens that suddenly stop working or when lines are produced instead of dots. Yet, a few patient moments of recuperating my interest and love for this kind of art, knowing the end result is worth all the hassle, I continue to push my boulder up the hill as Sisyphus did, striving to overcome the task one day (although Sisyphus didn’t and I bet he’s still pushing the boulder up the hill somewhere in the Greek hell :D).

In the end reader, however tiresome or annoying the task was, your patience is always rewarded. Once you remove all the messy bits and the weird lines, the beautiful image you constructed up in your mind is unearthed in the once blank canvass. And reader, you just know when looking at it, it was all worth it!