12.10.09 kulturnatib

Elephants and painting

Our daughter, just past infant, goes to a French speaking day care center. We have decided that it will be her mother tongue. She is learning it fast, as children do any language amongst the company of their peers and in the custody of the home. And she picks up songs rather keenly.

The other week, out of the blue, she started saying something that had us scratching our heads. We couldn't figure what it was except that it was probably something she picked up from the day care center. We figured, further, that it must be a fragment of a song.

We were right on both counts. I was intrigued by what the song turned out to be when we finally unraveled it. Even with my stagnating command of French I easily recognized – after we teased it out -- the phrase that, loosely translated, said, “To paint in oil is very difficult, much better (less difficult) to paint with water (watercolor).”

The first half of this song is actually also French 101. It is about an elephant with a trunk, an enormous trunk. How both parts of the song connect or relate is anybody's guess.

But it was the second part that intrigued me. How did this piece of artistic mythology or misconception really find its way into a children's song, which could be a testament to the French's affinity or proclivity for painting, if nothing else?

Yet, children's songs being the copyright resistant pieces of cultural treasures that they are whose pedigree or patrimony are a tangled ball of thread, there is probably no profit in inquiring into the hows or even whodunits of this song.

Still, better to educate our daughter, as soon as she is big enough, that this song and others of this genre are not all that factual. Or, to say that these songs have nothing, if little, to do with facts. It is even entirely possible that, especially with this song, facts are beside the point and fancy all of the point.

But, yes, as I have learned in my attempt at a degree in Fine Arts major in Painting, it is the other way around. Watercolor is the more difficult medium than oil. That is if you consider a good watercolor painting to be one that keeps to the essential translucent and delicate quality of the medium.

To achieve this one must, above all, be a master of the controlled accident. This is especially true with a technique that is called -- rather suggestively of something more prurient than painting – the wet on wet technique.

Wet can be just an area or the entire paper brushed on with water followed by a coat of wet color that can be applied with a paint brush, flicked on with a toothbrush or any other implement capable of delivering a layer of color.

The difficulty or the art, as practitioners no doubt would like to call it, is knowing how relatively wet or dry each should be. This takes precision, patience and practice. Because there is no fixity with water, one has to have liters of patience, and because even patience will run out, one must be willing to practice endlessly.

Or, in my case, one has to start practicing again. It is one thing to discuss all these with our daughter, it is entirely another thing to show her.