Ink Tarsia: word mosaic

We head for the cabin soon.  There is no TV, and after long days of chores and fixer-up projects, our evenings in the mountains are given over to quiet pursuits:  walks, books, dinner with neighbors, 1000-piece jigsaw puzzles, fierce bouts of pinochle, knitting looms, projects from The Dangerous Book for Boys.    

We’ve discovered the joy of paint-by-number.  There’s something soothing about squandering time to fill tiny, irregular shapes with a prescribed color, for a third-rate picture.  I love to paint—love the feel of a brush in my hand and the draw of paint across paper—but don’t have the artist’s eye to render what I see.   

My youngest, an artist, is frustrated with his “Celestial Glory” sun and stars kit.   He doesn’t like someone else making choices of color and line and composition for him.  When his brother takes over the painting, making mistakes with blobs of blue paint, he doesn’t care.    

I work at my sad retriever on a plaid wool blanket (“Devotion”), which reminds me of our old yellow Labrador, and feel content.  The hard part—accurate drawing—is done for me.  I move from left to right to fill the brown 7s, the golden 5s.  I mix #4 and #6 for blobs of “B.”  Voila!  I’m an artist.  

As the picture fills in, it’s clear that I’ve traded depth for ease.  This is an odd process, really, that a 3-dimensional dog would be rendered into a 2-dimensional painting, then scanned and schematized into something even an idiot could paint.  The paint-by-number version is even less 2-dimensional.  It’s flat and dull, a vague sense of something canine. 

The mechanical process of filling numbered blanks with paint from plastic nail-breaker tubs deconstructs how real paintings are made, with background and layer and highlight–a stratigraphy of tint.  If an original painting is built vertically with paint, my effort exists only in a horizontal plane, a flat pattern of side-by-side colors.  No depth.  I’m frustrated I can’t take the dog from flat to furry.  I don’t grasp how strokes of paint form the illusion of dimension and life. 

Writing can be drafted mechanically, word-by-number, filling blanks with fragmented text, setting awkward phrases into odd shapes.  Or it can be rendered with an eye for portrait and landscape, a crafting of language and perception into something interpreted, dimensional, whole.  To get from draft to art takes practice, vision, a chill-hearted edit, and perhaps time spent with dogged devotion after the chores are done.