Kurt R.A. Giambastiani

A year or so ago, like many other stressed-out adults searching for a bubble of calm in a turbulent world, I turned to a solution that was trending through social media: coloring. It was a fairly good solution, too. Coloring, for however long I chose to enjoy it, provided a period of quiet meditation combined with guided creativity. After a tempestuous day of corporate politics and political upheaval, I could look forward to spending an hour, head down, blending colors across mandalas and designs with whatever palette suited my whim. I could listen to music or to the birds outside in the wisteria or to the simple, basic sound of pencil and paper. It was a refuge, a Fortress of Coloring Solitude.

But when my father died, I stopped.

It wasn’t because the stress had died down—far from it, as dealing with the estate only tossed another bucket of stress into the lives of me and my siblings—but the allure had died and I could no longer draw from it the serenity that I enjoyed so much in the months before.

You see, my father was an artist. As we kids went through his belongings, sorting out and boxing up his life for donation or trash or bequeathal, I was surrounded by a lifetime of sketches, projects, paintings, notes, and doodles, not to mention the collection of easels, stretcher bars, canvases, dropcloths, brushes, and the myriad tubes and bottles of paint and solvents.

My childhood was spent among the vapors of linseed oil, turpentine, and oils. My colors were not the Crayola 64; they were the raucous colors of Grumbacher or Winsor & Newton: Prussian blue, burnt umber, cadmium red, yellow ochre, titanium white. My pubescent fantasies were not fed by the lingerie section of Sears & Roebuck catalogs, but by books about anatomy for artists and nude life studies.

So, when I came home from that awful week with a car packed with canvases, paintings, brushes, and oils, the idea of picking up a colored pencil and shading in someone else’s design just didn’t satisfy me anymore. I’d always admired my father’s talents in drawing and painting, I’d always wanted to take a run at it myself, and now, with his death, I realized that I did not have all the time in the world. If I wanted to do this, I’d best get cracking.

The problem is, I’m not very good.

Ages ago, I was able to advance beyond stick figures and produce some drawings that were recognizable as representational art, but I never really knew what I was doing. I’ve painted figurines for some of the board games we play, but even in that my knowledge is based on trial and error—lots of error—and not on actual craft. I just didn’t have the gift for it, I guessed.

Then an artist friend of mine, listening to my complaints, told me how wrong I was. When I first picked up a violin, I was probably as awful as anyone could be. It is unlikely that the first meal I cooked was worthy of Cordon Bleu. And the first stories I wrote? By my own admission, they were pretty awful, most of them. So why did I expect to be able to draw or paint without study and practice?

She was right, of course, and thus began my crab-walk toward a new outlet for creativity.

But while I am studying color theory and composition, and learning the essentials of how to draw, I really wanted to play with paints on canvas. The solution is like coloring, but with paints: paint by numbers. My artist friend concurs: it’s a good way to become familiar with how paint works with canvas, and a way to practice brush techniques. Like coloring with pencils on paper, I’m using someone else’s design (as in the picture above), and it’s much more limited in that I’m also using their color scheme, but this is not an exercise in creativity; this is like scales on the violin: I’m learning the techniques.

Like coloring, it’s meditative and peaceful. Unlike coloring, it takes a long time to finish a single picture. But I’m also learning something, something I want to learn, and that excites me.

If you’re interested in giving it a shot yourself, there are many paint-by-number designs available. You have to weed through a lot of trite and cheesy designs of puppies and horses and couples near the Eiffel Tower to reach the few that (I think) are worthy of reproduction, but if you buy your own stretcher bars (reusable) you can get a canvas kit (with brushes and pre-mixed acrylic paints) for about $12–15. I have all my dad’s brushes, and eventually got myself a table easel, too.

It’s “baby steps” toward my goal of being able to sit down on a bench and draw a scene from life, but it’s forward progress.

k