My father tells me there is more space than I think in a tree. Trees aren’t tidy. They don’t exist in neat circles with even gaps between the branches. There’s lots of space between the leaves, for example, he says.
I’m showing him my paintings. My dad’s a proper painter. I’m only starting. He’s 89. I just turned 60. I’m hoping he might give me lessons.
He tells me when you start out painting, you paint what you think you see, but what you think you see is often not exactly what’s there. It’s not like a mistake or anything. It’s just your brain trying to smooth things out for you, so you can process the world without being overwhelmed. It makes thousands, maybe billions of decisions every minute, so you can get through mundane tasks, like standing up or moving around without falling over or bumping into stuff. It sounds like hard work.
I like painting. I like the colours. I like the thickness of the paper. I like the feel of a brush in my hand. I like to watch the pigments move through water, with a mind of their own. I don’t care about being any good. I’m freewheeling.
I’m hoping dad and I might paint together. Even though he says his hands are too shaky these days for the precision he is used too.
I never had precision to start with, so I don’t care. I’m happy to play.
Dad tells me where I’m going wrong. I’m too tidy, he says. The tree I think I see doesn’t exist. It’s my brain doing that thing brains do.
‘You can get around it,’ he says. He tells me to try painting a tree upside down. The wrong way up. Trick my brain into seeing what’s actually there, instead of what I think I see.
‘It will look more like itself,’ he says. ‘You’d be surprised.’
I don’t understand.
‘You mean, with the leaves at the bottom and the roots in the sky?’
‘Exactly.’
I say I’ll try. I ask if he’ll show me one day soon, and he promises he will. This is a win.
In the meantime, I’ve found some of his old brushes to paint with. Stiff with age and use, the bristles crumble on to the page while I work. I use them all. I use brushes meant for oils even though I’m painting in watercolour. I use a palette knife I found in a jar in his old sunroom.’
‘That one won’t be any good,’ he tells me when I show him. ‘That’s not what it’s meant for.’ He makes a sweeping movement with his hand to illustrate the correct use.
‘I’m going to give it a go anyway,’ I say. And he kind of gets that.
I’m using the waters of my childhood and from special places to paint with. I collect it in jars and bottles. I stand knee deep in the ocean, I wade past reeds and salt paperbarks to the estuary. I lay on my stomach and dangle from jetties and bridges to fill milk bottles and water containers.
I mix colours with the river water where I learned to swim, with water from the ocean where I watched him surf and I played in the rolling waves while I waited.
My dad’s 89, and I just turned 60. I’m scared we’re running out of time. I’m looking for memories to hold onto. In rivers that are constantly moving and changing. In brushes my father held in hands too shaky now for precision. In trees as they really are, not just what I think I see. I want to find the spaces I’m missing between the leaves.
