Watercolors have been a great pleasure in my life since I was a child, but they always took a back seat to the piano.
It is a sweet pastime, because there is none of the physical energy required in playing the piano, nor the stress of a goal. Someone once told me, if you do not like the result, just toss it out, or put it away, until you forget what your original intention was, and later discover that the sketch had some value after all.
When I travel, I carry a small set of fine watercolors and a small sketchbook. Once, at a London airport, an alarm went off, and to my horror I had caused it!
“Madam what do you have in your bag?” asked the guards.
Out tumbled tubes of paint containing Strontium, or Cadmium, or Thallium… all ores triggering their instruments. From then on, I use the smallest box of adequate colors for my modest little sketches,
and I have learned to sketch quite fast –from a train, when an exquisite Tuscan landscape is whizzing by or while baking under a hot Tuscan sun, which dries the page almost instantly.
I have sketched quietly in a concert hall or church during a concert, and beside a lake in the Tetons, with a moose wading near me. But I lost that Western journal—my best ever…and it took me long to get over it, because while you sketch, you experience and absorb the sight, smell and light of a place as no photo could preserve.
When I sit down to paint, any tension from an upcoming concert floats right out of me, so it is a wonderful antidote to the musical part of my life.
C.M.
