The Art of Play

Around 2006, maybe a year or so earlier, I joined a small art group. Our first assignment was just to get colour on the page. Any colour. Then, if we wanted to, add another colour or design. Just three of us, we sat at a picnic table at Willows Beach in Victoria on a sunlit day, children and their families playing in the sand and water. I think we brought our own paints - not sure of that memory detail. Paints were not from an Art Store but from a drugstore. At the time, wandering the isles for who knows what, I came upon an art small set of water colours with one brush. I chose some inexpensive watercolour paper. From there, my hobby of water colour painting began. For most of the next decade, I painted and I wrote on my days off. It was not only play for me but focus and distraction. When words were stuck inside me, I would get up and paint. Just the movement of the brush, the colours magically appearing, images suggesting a horizon, a bird, a cloud, the night sky……..anything. Slowly and sometimes suddenly, the right words started dancing in my head and I could go back to my writing. 

Years later, someone said that watercolour painting was really hard! Maybe for an acclaimed artist, but I have never set myself to that standard. It’s only the images in my head that I try to put on paper. In the last couple of decades, I let that colourful play grow fallow. My tubes of paints ~ from a genuine Art Store ~ completely dried up. Today, shopping for household items, I took my time. Up one aisle and down the other, I look for what I might want for my great grand daughters. But what caught my eye was this paint set ~ definitely for me. I will share, but it’s time to get out to play on my own time. Every day, I see my real paint brushes growing dusty in jars or dry in their cases. My stack of paintings from those first years are hidden in a closet. The little portable easel sits atop a wicker four drawer cupboard, it too gathering dust. In the busy, noisy mall today, besides the parchment paper and lid for the cat food, I found this little corner of joy. I keep routine in my life that includes writing. Painting now has its place beside my writing.

“We are never more fully alive, more completely ourselves, 

or more deeply engrossed in anything than when we are playing.”

~ Charles E. Schaefer