My mind runs. Lists. A conversation from four days ago replayed with my side improved. Plans nobody has agreed to yet. If your mind is endlessly going like mine does, you know that “just relax” is advice from someone whose mind isn’t.
I meditate, and it works. Sit, breathe, let the noise settle. I keep doing it.
What I didn’t know is that there’s more than one door into that room.
I’ve painted in acrylic for over ten years. Less than a year ago I switched to oil, and I did it to make things harder on myself. Ten years is long enough to get comfortable. I wanted a medium that would take something out of me.
It has. I just didn’t expect it to give this back.
I finished my second oil last week. A beach at sunset, sea grass bending in the wind, footprints going down to the water. I worked from a photo I found. My husband and I love the ocean, so any beach would have done. This one had the sky I wanted.
The switch is what changed it. Acrylic dries while you’re still deciding. You mix a color, and by the time it’s on the canvas it’s already drifting somewhere darker than what you mixed, so you’re always working a step behind yourself. Oil stays wet for days. The color you mix is the color that stays. You can push a cloud around, walk away, come back the next morning and move it again, or scrape the whole section off and start it over.
I didn’t expect that to matter as much as it does.
Here’s what happens now when I paint. The brush is on the canvas and then it isn’t, and I load it again, and the whole of me is inside one small decision about whether this cloud is dark enough yet. That’s it. That’s the entire contents of my head. Is it dark enough yet.
No list running underneath. Nothing waiting for a reply.
I look up and two hours are gone and I couldn’t tell you what I thought about, because I wasn’t thinking. I was mixing a color, getting it wrong, and mixing it again.
The sky took the longest. All that weather sitting low and heavy, the sun behind it, the light having to find its way through the gaps. In acrylic I’d have had one pass at it. In oil I got to keep asking.
It’s the same quiet I get from sitting and breathing. It arrives by a different road, that’s all. I don’t have to be still to get there. My hands are busy and my shoulders come down anyway, and I don’t notice it happening until I stop.
That surprised me. I’d been treating stillness as the price of admission.
I gave the painting to my husband for our anniversary and it’s going up in his office. He works with patients all day in a room without much of a view. I wanted something on that wall worth looking at, for him and for whoever’s across from him having a hard day.
And I’m proud of it. It isn’t perfect and I’m still learning, and I’m proud of it anyway. I painted a sky I like.
I’m not doing any of this alone. My teacher is Katayoon Moghaddam-Soroush, and she’s the reason the switch to oil didn’t beat me in the first month. She makes the impossible feel learnable, which is a rarer thing in a teacher than it sounds, and somewhere in the last few years she became one of my closest friends. She teaches classes, workshops, and camps on Long Island, all ages, all levels. If any of this is tugging at you, she’s where I’d send you.
If your head doesn’t stop, don’t go looking for the quiet. Go looking for the thing small enough to hold all of you. One cloud. One row of stitches. One line of a song you’re learning badly. The quiet comes in behind it.
Mine turned out to be a brush. I wouldn’t have guessed.
Find Katayoon on Instagram at @katayoonarts.
