Mark making and color

On the one hand, I like to paint things, I mean representations of objects, both real and imaginary. On the other hand, I like the act of painting with no specific goal. I like putting down shapes and colors on the page. It's deeply enjoyable to load a brush with color from the pan and make a mark on the paper. It's even more pleasant to mix a color, or dilute it to various consistencies and observe how it shows up on the paper.

It's wonderful to feel the shape form out of the organic movements of my body, my innate gestures, and see what happens. The action of paint with water, the way layers of transparent color show up on top of each other when dry, or the way they interact when wet, all of these actions and reactions are a pleasure.

Since I got over my fear of wasting the good paper, I've been playing like this with watercolors. I have always enjoyed making shapes. When you do it with a pencil or pen, most people call it doodling. My doodles have gotten very elaborate and have a vocabulary of shapes. I decorate many of my posts with these shapes that look almost like writing. However, when it came to watercolor, I felt for a while that I needed to paint in response to objects instead of just out of the spontaneous shapes as they came out.

Where do these made up rules come from? Why did I need to have a teacher show me that I could break thm? It seems that with every art form, there are these made up rules that are so ingrained we don't even know them. Unknown knowns, if you will. There are also real rules that we do have to learn like don't lick your brushes and how pigment numbering works, and that the shapes of things in reality are different than you think they are.

In the language of fine art, doodles and stuff like that are called mark making^[1]. I noticed a lot of my favorite classes mentioned mark making or "the practice of mark making" in their description, and I got curious about the term. I would doodle with paint anyway because I like it. However, understanding the concept of mark making has freed me to do it more, and to think of it as both an end in itself, and as a way to develop my familiarity with my medium, tools, and even my own gestures. I have a lot to learn about watercolor. I'm in this exciting space of being enough of a beginner that I can make quick progress and at the same time have spent enough time that I have ideas about what I should practice and what I might want to learn next. Art and creative work are wonderful in that you can always learn more, of course, but this is a particularly sweet spot in the learning process.

I still want to represent objects. That's a big part of the appeal of watercolor, that it lets me capture the sense of an object I like, for example a landscape or a plant. Sometimes an exercise that start out as just mark making with no particular intention becomes representational when I notice the blobs and shapes suggest an object and add details to create better suggest that object. Over time, I hope these happy accidents and discoveries will build up a set of skilled practices I can use when I want to represent something specific.