SUZANNE SIMANAITIS
Create a mixed-media painting with your bare hands—no brushes or tools allowed.
Anyone who makes art with me knows I love to get messy. I’ve been known to declare that I paint with my hands—paintbrushes be damned! So I welcomed this challenge: to create a mixed-media painting using only my hands, no tools. This’ll be a cinch, I secretly gloated.
Boy, was I wrong….
I had overlooked the fact that while I usually don’t use a paintbrush to apply paint to surfaces, I do use a multitude of improvised tools to move the paint around, such as an old credit card to drag through the paint, bubble wrap to pick paint up and the plump round imprint made by the bottom of the paint bottles themselves. Even the humble crumpled paper towel is a valuable element in my process. Every time I squirted out some paint I reached instinctively for one of these old friends, only to recoil upon remembering the challenge: No tools whatsoever.
Hmmm.
I could drizzle and fling paint straight from the container a la Jackson Pollock. Nah, I wanted the finished piece to retain a clear sense of my hands. I also figured my fluid acrylics would self-level into a puddle rather than provide any approximation of Pollock’s luscious textures. Anyway, I think old Jack the Dripper perfected that sort of thing, and he used tools too, even if they were just dried-up old brushes and cans with holes.
I could layer numerous colors and patterns onto paper using fingers, palm, knuckles and nails. I envisioned a result somewhere between prehistoric cave paintings, classic paste papers and Anne Bagby’s luscious “complicated papers.” But my attempts at manipulating the paint fell (literally) flat, and I decided that thickening it with wallpaper paste would be too much of a crutch and therefore off limits. No, this exercise was strictly about me and the paint.
Finally, I arrived at the most helpful realization of all: Stop thinking about it so much and just start! So that’s what I did.
I chose a roomy, 16” × 24” (41cm X 61cm) stretched canvas that would allow me to use sweeping gestures, laid down a tarp and began squirting paint around. At first I daintily dabbed with fingertips, but soon I was smearing great swaths of paint using the side of my hand, vigorously massaging paint into the canvas and recklessly scratching it back off.
Between colors I sometimes swished my hands in a bowl of water to keep the whole affair from deteriorating into madness. The residual water on my skin helped to lift and spread the fluid acrylics on the canvas, resulting in some nifty transparent areas. I flicked water droplets onto freshly painted areas, hoping to generate drips or another interesting effect. Was using water out of bounds? Maybe, but I decided clean hands were better than the alternative.
Eventually I had one of what I call my “cosmic anvil moments,” when I realized it was not entirely true that my only tools for this project were my hands. Without even thinking about it, I also employed my artist’s eye to assess what was happening on the painted surface, and I called upon my artist’s intuition to direct my choice of colors, strokes and placement. I could not have disengaged those “tools” if I’d tried, short of wearing a blindfold or working in a pitch-black room. So I decided to celebrate this trio of bodily tools in my composition by using a fingernail to scratch eye, heart and hands into the rapidly drying paint. A few more dabs resulted in simple (really simple!) visual representations of the same.
As I applied the finishing touches, it surprised me to notice that I’d become a bit emotional about this canvas. While I worked on it, I thought it might turn out “interesting” or even “pretty,” and I did not expect it to become imbued with deep personal significance. But it did. I guess that in stripping my process down to the bare minimum and turning off my brain for a while, I prepared a welcoming environment for symbol and meaning to bubble up.
I certainly do not think of myself as an accomplished “painter,” but this exercise in simplicity helped me recognize the powerful creative gifts I carry with me at all times. You can take away an artist’s tools, but that won’t deplete her essential artistness.
EYE/HEART/HAND