Last Saturday aklikins and I took a “Impressionistic Fingerpainting” class with Allen Montague at Jerry’s Artarama in Raleigh.  Yes, it was fun!  (I had to get over a little bit of “ew– messy!” and “is this OK/good enough/right?” and “I’m never going to get this out from under my fingernails”1) but once I got over those self-self mental roadblocks it was a blast.

And, joy-of-joys, I’m kind of happy with the result:

Yes, it’s sort of cheating, in a paint-by-numbers, Bob-Ross-Happy-Trees-sort-of-way, *BUT*  for someone (namely me) who has never been pleased with anything that she’s done that started with flat white space and ended up as something to hang on a wall2, it’s AOK.  Good, even.

1 Five days later, there’s still a good bit of relcalcitrant Carbon Black under my primary background-covering thumbnail.
2 Photography, somehow, doesn’t “count” in that it also feels like I cheated in that whatever I took a picture of *was there* …all I did was push a button.  Way crazy and wrong in many ways, of course, from the “provable” (fiddling with settings and whatnot) to the more subjective (did I “see” something that someone else wouldn’t), but that doesn’t keep the inner “you don’t do art, you just make ‘crafts'” critic3 from going on and on.
3 For the record, *I* don’t think that “crafts” are any less “worthy” than “art” (dang, could this post have any more quotes???); however, this is the same inner critic who insists that “thinner is always prettier”…clearly she’s a little bent.