Evolution Revelation

I'm excited to be sharing the launch of this website to showcase the joy of painting and my evolution as an 'artist' (I'm still not comfortable with the term) so that I might inspire you to explore your own creativity.

Maybe it's Maybelline

Most of us are not born with the innate talent to pick up a brush, pencil, palette knife or whatever the medium - and create a masterpiece. It takes practice and lots of experiments to produce something that makes you feel good.

Notice two things about that statement. When you are 'practising and experimenting', you'll have more so-called failures than what you perceive to be successes. This is how you get better! I am in the midst of a course that is teaching me just that. Today's homework is to create something ugly by using colours and tools that I don't normally use combined with those that I do. I'm kind of skeptical because I feel like the only thing that would be ugly is a big muddy blob of paint, but I will work through the process with an open curiosity and see what happens.

Fall down 7 times, get up 8

The second part of the statement above that I want to highlight is producing something that makes you feel good. Why else would you create? I love beautiful things - from jewellery to photos to sewing, crocheting, needlepoint and many, many crafts. I realize that I've been honing my skills in various ways over the years.

As a young adult, I didn't feel like I was or could be an artist. I envied my friend, Dwayne, who could draw so well. He was always sketching something. I was the scholarly student excelling in everything, but especially in math, so I was encouraged to seek a career in that direction landing me with the Hon. B. Comm. degree. But it didn't feel quite so exhilarating as I had imagined it would. I was good at it, but I was bored.

Fast forward 30 years and I'm finding my joy every day. I happily move from one creative project to another, experimenting and learning what I like, what I don't like and I want to share that with you.

Evolution - it's a process

How did I get here - my living room is a studio, I'm teaching classes, selling paintings, taking commission, private bookings, and launching www.paintwithlisa.com !

It's a process. Over the years, I've painted things like the murals for my children's playroom by carefully copying from books and mixing paints from the dollar store to come up with a satisfactory result. Side note - it's realllllllllly difficult to cover up the orange and black stripes of my favourite Pooh friend, Tigger. There are products that are helpful that I eventually found.

Then I tried some sketching which turned out ok. But I wasn't motivated to pick up the pencil every day. I felt indecisive and tentative and wasn't really enjoying the process, just feeling stubborn about getting the result that I wanted.

I dabbled in painting, attended some wine and paint parties and produced ok results, but again wasn't satisfied and felt a bit disappointed about not creating a masterpiece! What I didn't realize was that I was honing my skills. My stubbornness pushed me through the tough parts. When I was painting the Winnie the Pooh mural, I put Owl in time out for 3 weeks because it was so hard to get the wings right. To this day, I still struggle with owls, but I've improved!

Always learning

Life is a long process of learning and evolving. Sometimes we get stuck for a bit, or cocoon to re-emerge, changed by whatever life experiences have been presented to us. I am grateful to be able to share what I've learned and have the opportunity to inspire others to explore their creativity.