How Winston Churchill tackled a blank canvas

  • churchillschartwell.jpgAs I think I’ve said, I enjoy draw­ing and paint­ing very much, and it makes me sad that there aren’t more peo­ple who get into it as a pasttime.

    From what I’ve seen, there are two things that kill off the would-be artist right away, long before they’ve had any way of know­ing if they like what they’re doing or might pro­duce some­thing that they’d enjoy look­ing at in the future. The one-two punch when you start out is an ini­tial lack of con­fi­dence in mak­ing marks on an empty can­vas or piece of paper, fol­lowed by harsh self-criticism of what­ever marks you make. So the inter­nal dia­log goes some­thing like:

    1. Agh! It’s so white. It’s just com­pletely blank and if there’s going to be any­thing there, I’m going to have to put it there. Okay. All right. Don’t panic. Make the small­est, tini­est, light­est marks you can and see if you can man­age not to screw this up.
    2. No. No. NO! That’s all wrong. Those four marks don’t look any­thing like a tree. You’re an idiot. You have no class. You should leave this kind of thing to trained pro­fes­sion­als like Thomas Kinkade. Put that brush down before you kill someone.

    With all that going on in the first two min­utes, it’s no won­der that draw­ing and paint­ing seem like more of an exer­cise in self-flagellation than creativity.

    Appar­ently, Win­ston Churchill felt the same way. I’ve just come across an arti­cle in an old Weekly Stan­dard (Link HERE, but you might have to reg­is­ter to see it), and though Churchill even­tu­ally came to say “If it weren’t for paint­ing, I could not live,” he appar­ently had to over­come the same chal­lenges as every new artist. I thought the pas­sage below might offer a bit of help not only on how to face a white can­vas, but how to get on with every new challenge.

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    Hav­ing acquired easel and col­ors, he describes his first timid steps in front of the can­vas: “The palette gleamed with beads of color. Fair and white rose the can­vas, the empty brush hung poised, heavy with des­tiny, irres­olute in the air. My hand seemed arrested by a silent veto.”

    But not­ing that the sky was a pale blue, he pro­ceeded gin­gerly to load a “very small brush” with blue paint and, then, “with infi­nite pre­cau­tion made a mark about as big as a bean on the affronted snow-white shield. It was a chal­lenge, a delib­er­ate chal­lenge; but so sub­dued, so halt­ing, indeed so catalep­tic, that it deserved no response.”

    At this point, the wife of his neigh­bor, the painter Sir John Lav­ery, arrives in his dri­ve­way in her car. She sees his hes­i­ta­tion, res­olutely grabs a large brush and inflicts “sev­eral large fierce strokes and slashes of blue on the absolutely cow­er­ing canvass.”

    And lo, “No evil fate avenged the jaunty vio­lence. The can­vass grinned in help­less­ness before me. The spell was bro­ken. The sickly inhi­bi­tion rolled away. I seized the largest brush and fell upon my vic­tim with Berserk fury. I have never felt any awe of a can­vass since.”

    For the record, the Churchill paint­ing at top recently sold at Sotheby’s for a record one mil­lion pounds.


    Related posts:

    1. It’s fall! I’m draw­ing as fast as I can!
    2. Empty nesters
    3. Ven­er­a­tion in art muse­ums, chi­huahua dumb­ness, etc.

    October 13th, 2007 | Grace | 4 Comments |

4 Responses and Counting...

  • DebD 10.13.2007

    My husband’s grand­fa­ther was an old coun­try (cra­dle to grave) doc­tor who prac­ticed dur­ing the depres­sion and through post-war era as part of the Mar­shal Plan in Japan. He was also a won­der­ful painter and we are blessed to have sev­eral beau­ti­ful pieces of his. My MIL has told me that paint­ing was his way to get away, unwind, and deal with the inevitable sad­ness that came with his career. She said that this need was espe­cially present dur­ing polio outbreaks.

  • Mimi

    I think we all need a hobby to be able to retreat to, and it’s a gift that yours is draw­ing (beautifully)

  • Grace

    DebD:
    Sounds like your rel­a­tive was a man after Churchill’s heart. I didn’t quote this part of the arti­cle, but they had more back­ground about how he found he needed paint­ing to help him cope with all the pres­sures he was under. I cer­tainly know how that’s true of most of us hob­by­ists, but it never occurred to me that it would work for peo­ple who were car­ry­ing the whole world on their shoulders.

  • Grace

    Mimi:
    Hobby: Amen. Really ener­getic peo­ple can man­age a vari­ety of hob­bies, but I’m a lazy thing and can only do a bit of sketch­ing and blog­ging. Still, it is kind of nec­es­sary for my men­tal health. (If I was a bet­ter artist and blog­ger it might be ben­e­fi­cial to other people’s men­tal health as well, eh? ;-) )

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