Painting

An old gardener once said to me, "If there's a rock in the center of the pond, the carp will circle around it. But if there's no rock at the center, the carp don't eat well and they don't thrive."

-- Robert Bly, "The Translucent Stone"

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If someone else would do the taping and the clean-up for me, I think I could get into painting.

I applied a second coat on my sisters' bathroom walls this morning. Pale blue over off-white. It looks nice. This specific shade makes me think of ocean water and Bubblicious gum at the same time. Maybe a bubble-gum ocean. One that you could bathe in.

Brushes, in my opinion, are better than rollers. Perhaps it is the intimacy of the brush: close, small, finishing details. The roller is big, obtrusive, like a road construction rolling machine, seeming to squash the paint against the wall, flat on flat, spitting paint flecks back at you, squeaking, peeling and sucking. It's like slapping a sweaty fat person with sunscreen. Using the brush, though, is like caressing the wall, applying paint rather than pushing it. I like watching the paint make its way out of bent bristles. It makes me think about children who get lost in the woods and find a way out of the trees. Maybe this is stupid, but it feels like I'm helping the paint get to the wall using the brush. A roller makes me feel like I'm forcing it where it doesn't want to go.

This might be stupid, too, but I don't like the shape of the roller. It looks sort of like a hanger, or a really conceited question mark. I decided a long time ago that hangers made me think of stuffy British people wearing my clothes.

My painting experience is limited to interior house jobs, with the exception of when we painted our deck, stage painting, and way back when, a lot of experimentation with watercolors and finger-paints. Cheap stuff, really. I wonder if painting a portrait is more or less stressful than painting a house.