How to Teach a Class Made of Water
A piece about a kind of process that is literally made of water
“This piece is like the edge of being washed away but it isn’t being washed away”, is one of the things Sabrina Orah Mark said about the piece below when I read this in her workshop.
I wrote this piece last month before teaching a class I was afraid to teach and after moving in more fully into a new apartment after having left the old one of 12 years. So much making things anew in the last few years. And why I felt like I couldn’t teach a simple watercolor class was beyond most of the friends I spoke to about this but if you teach or want to teach, this might help you to know that we all have owls that are ghosts of a sort that ask a lot of us and question everything we think we think and want to do and say, even how we want to say it. Maybe after you read you can tell me about your owls in the comments.
This piece is a little longer so if you’re like, “oh crap! This is too long!” you can listen to it while you work or drive with the VoiceOver above if you’d like. I’m a little stumbly in this recording but it does the job.
Made of Water
A rose gold owl flanked by dimmed green trees. Eyes made of turmeric, feathers of ash, eclipse the bright yellow flower from yesterday with the blackest black wings and make the sky.
One
I wasn’t thinking too hard when I mention to the owl, I’m going to teach a watercolor class and I’ll call it “Watercolor for Writers”! My idea was that writers might like a watercolor class because two writers I know asked, “Hey can you teach me how to watercolor?” I may have answered, I’ll show you! So this afternoon I’ll teach a class called Watercolor for Writers comprised of 25 writers and a few random people such as a lawyer, a writer friend’s mom who I know from the writer’s writing and a woman who works as a caretaker in a chimpanzee sanctuary. The owl, who incidentally was, actually was, made of watercolor thought it was a bold move.
I say, I don’t know owl. I seem to be avoiding something else but since I announced it I can’t stop thinking about it. The owl gives me the same look as the owl in the picture up there. The owl knows something I don’t. The owl is my ghost today.
Two
In a few hours I will teach the class and a few hours after that it will be done. The ship will have sailed on the watercolor ocean of watercolor waves piloted by a watercolor owl who lives inside me unless I release the owl here. The ship has probably now sailed as I edit and as you read and perhaps it was all just a terrible idea. The only knowing one is probably this owl.
I call my old, older friend Rob who tells me he has turned into my old Italian grandmother. Maybe he is my Fairy with the Turquoise Hair from Pinocchio who just wants to die happily when I finally learn to do the righter thing.
I say I just want to do my best Rob so you can die happily. I want to tell the class that the common bond is that we are all made of water and color.
I want to say: The rubric is the words. “I want to paint it though, not say it. Tell me what you think?”
He tells me I’m just nervous about the class because he thinks I think I need to get overly philosophical about it like a goddamn college professor. “Darlin’ its a rogue art school. You can do what you want.”
“But it’s a class for writers specifically Rob! Writers are deep thinkers. Writers are philosophical. Now writers and even writer’s mothers, some writer’s children’s grandmothers are even coming! A caregiver at a chimpanzee sanctuary is coming!
“Listen honey, there is something so ativistic about watercolor, there isn’t a doubt, but no one wants to be philosophical in a watercolor class,” he says.
I look at my empty walls and think, Maybe I’ve been laying it on too thick all this time. I tell him he’s right! he’s right! he’s always right!
Later I practice my philosophy of watercolor class anyway in front of a fake mirror known as my computer. I dress in a striped gondola-man shirt: I hold a boat paddle and say to the class which isn’t the class yet: “We are made of roughy 45-70% water but we are also made of other people. We are made of 40-75% rock.”
Three
The ocean roars and the wind on the river is unmistakable. I decide now I should talk about the origin of man since we are so close to touching it and because I get tired of saying the same old thing every time like a clown but admit I am still learning about all of this myself and it would be unfair to tell lies. I am still learning everything. I know so little and sometimes I have this feeling I know too much which makes the world look plenty bleak.
I turn into pages written in Aramaic. I turn into a brush made from ancient squirrels. Poor squirrels. I turn into water and sometimes into stone and make a place for the squirrels to hide. I turn into the end.
I tell the class because in the end there will only be water and rock and sticks, maybe some ferns and mushrooms which make nice colors. We will always have painting and writing. In the end. I change out of the Gondola-man costume and wash some dishes.
I don’t really know how to translate any of this into watercolor but honestly I think its because I’m just not drinking enough water to keep my percentages up. I’ve soaked in everything I can, learning about water and color and words, only to find each is unknowable and untouchable.
Four
At 2:41 I write to a writer friend, K! I can’t sit down to write. Did they teach this in your MFA program?
At 2:42 she writes back, They did not. I struggle with this HARD.
At 4:38 I write, I did hang some paintings today though.
At 5:31 I write, I’m writing now. I’m just letting it be bizarre and foreign for now but I’m sure it will find its way home on its own?
At 6:06 she writes back: I feel very confident the writing path is a winding and very strange one but I guess we are on it.
Five
“What we feel when water or words permeates paper is the rubric,” Rob said, “But darlin’…you cant bore them with this stuff, just show them. Show them what you intrinsically know how to do.” He used so many amazing words when he said this. His words flowed like a river
Six
“We are made of 45-70% water and other people and also words. And rock. Most people are made of 20-75% words. Most people are made of 100% other people. Water, words of some sort, rock and 100% other people too, not in that order.” I say to the owl back there.
Not everyone has this kind of fluency in water and words, I tell the pretend class. It’s hard work to be fluent in anything. I say, close your eyes Class. I say, close your eyes Reader, you too. Close your eyes and imagine you are in a field of dandelions. What colors do you see?
Some people see bright yellow. Some people see a strange kind of warm gray. Some people see the hairy dulled green forward of spring. Some people have eyes that prefer the soft sap-colored four leaf clovers with thin stripes of pistachio lining their delicate leaves growing by the hundreds of thousands between the maligned dots of dirty gumdrops. Some people see a strange greenish pinked tan, a kind of sour rhubarb, the withered September stem after all the axillary wish buds have been blown and flown from the head. The head barely holds it all together. They look like little lady heads. Some people see little lion heads. Some people see little ovaries. Some people see sunshine, and some little trees, some little parachutes holding little soldiers. Some people just see little hairy manipulative parachutes that have tricked us into making wishes to save the lives of these little soldiers and the lives of their family of sunshine-headed lion witches. Scientifically I have no idea if dandelions are made of people. Mostly they are made of water and color.
Rob calls back saying, “No darlin’, you can’t tell people that. They just want to figure out how to paint with the stuff.” He tells me writers need to express the visual thru words. They need the image. “Hey honey, everyone just wants to conjure up something to make sense of all this.”
I tell him, “I don’t know which is more seductive a medium—words or water? Both are so indeterminate and the only control are whatever little lassos we make with our bodies, hoping not to forget that every drop in our broken sunshine heads is a word. Our broken sunshine-facing heads are filled quite often with wasted drops, with mouths that get the drops wrong nearly constantly. Our broken beautiful little moon shaped heads.
“Watercolor is primal—it has a fluidity that no other medium has---it resonates with life. It’s atavistic. It smells of Stone. It tastes of Water. It cuts canyons, evaporation is its mark with a feeling yet unnamed until someone somehow is electrified by it. We fill paper with feelings and energy and maybe a world gets built to take them down their rivers refreshed. These are the things we do. Words too. Right? It’s true, isn’t it?”
I have transcribed our entire conversation and regurgitated it back to him.
“Shit honey. You know it took Nabokov three fucking weeks to tweak a paragraph? I fucking love watercolor.”
Me too honey. Me too.
“The pursuit of art is the pursuit of philosophy…but don't fucking tell them that sweetie pie,” says Rob.
I won’t. I’ll probably just dump the ocean into jars and grind your words into color and try to get lucky.
After Words: The Story Above Is A Tale
After looking at the same tree outside the window for twenty minutes, searching for the rubric, I took out all the nails in the house and hammered them into random places on these new walls. I took out all the art and all the family photos that have lived sequestered in large boxes for months and balanced them by their wooden frames wherever I had hammered a nail. Everything is even more than it ever was now. Everything unpacked has a new universe, a second chance to tell its strange and beautiful story to whatever lives next to it. I hang each piece as though its life was created to speak. I did all of this to avoid writing.
The day before was a Sunday and the sun was shining, and the flowers were shining and the people on the streets were shining and we made little shelves for my new studio out of small pieces of wood from my old desk which we cut in half, finally, to fit the wall. I made a little place to call a workspace, which is like having a little place to tell a story. A little room to wonder if I’m doing it right or just doing anything. Am I doing it right? But there is always an echo when I ask that now.
It was only later in the day on Sunday down by the river in the tall Spring grass when I noticed we were without mothers. So we walked down to the edge, collected a bottle of East River water and made ourselves a river of mothers. We put my mother, my husband’s mother, the fairy with the turquoise hair sort of mother from the Pinocchio story, we put my grandmother and her mother and her mother’s mother in the river. We put my husband’s grandmother and her mother and her grandmothers in the river too. We went back to the first grandmother who, it turns out, was both of our grandmothers and planted her gently in the river. We found your grandmothers too and put them in the river.
Somehow the witch from a house made of confections who had a big bread-baking oven to bake bread in her forest, the witch visited by little Hansel and Gretel—we put her in the river. The grandmother from every tale. We put as many grandmothers and witches as we could into the river and drank from the sweet and salty river until we were sick.
We didn’t cry this year.
Our laughter was our grandmother’s laughter. We laid in bed all night with stomach-aches and all this river circled around, flowed beneath us, snaked over us like we were rocks, drowned us. This river we made took care of us.
“Oh! This river wasn’t made by us at all!” I tell the river we made, and I can’t tell if drinking the river makes us remember or forget.
“Everyone just wants to make something. I don't know why that’s not enough!” Whispered all the grandmothers (and witches) as they flowed on by.
A BIG thank you to Michael Judge for his enormous compliment today. I am ever grateful for your support and brilliance.
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In answer to the question, “Is all of this your art?” Yes it is indeed.
In answer to the question, “Is any of it for sale?” Yes is the answer to that too. Whatever hasn’t been sold already is often for sale. Feel free to message me to inquire.
thank you
dishes,looking at trees ,water-cuurled-coloured sounds and a voiceword floating by, and gumdrops and white and grey honeypies evoke other multi-coloured memories.
the fear ,the grief ,the inbetween dishwashing
and the friendly words ,always the friendly words ,all of that makes our flowers grow.
loved to listen to this post.