The Lie of "Can't"

I haven’t painted for well over 10 years – mostly because every time I think about doing it that voice in my head says “I can’t paint”. I listen to it and put away the thought of painting for a while.

I got an email recently about a workshop at Continental Art, a local art store. Golden Paints has come out with a new type of acrylic paint that has a very long drying time so that you can blend and work it more like oil paints (even though it’s acrylic). So I signed up for the workshop.

After we did the preliminary work on the first painting (a fruit still life) and set that aside to dry Amy, the instructor says “next you’re going to paint a scene from memory”. Automatically that little voice says “I can’t do that!”. But I was there, it was a hands-on workshop and I didn’t have anything to lose by trying.

About 10 minutes later I had this - a perfectly acceptable representation of a beach I was at last weekend.

 

I made this flower using a printing technique with freezer paper (rather than directly painting on the paper). There is gold and copper paint mixed in with the color so it has a lovely metallic look against the black paper.

 This was another painting technique we learned -

Each of these took about 10 – 20 minutes to make and I think each one is more than acceptable.

By the way, this is something I painted back when I was in school.

So apparently THAT particular voice in my head doesn’t know what the hell it’s talking about. You'll have to excuse me now. I’m going to go have a talk with it about some of the other things it’s been telling me I can't do. It’s time to stop listening to the lie of “can’t”!