Yesterday, in the factory, packing things and waiting for truck drivers, I skipped the lunch break and exchanged it for a quick yoghurt and an hour water color session. Yes, sometimes, I bring paper and color down there to the where I pack perfume. Just in case. You never know. Maybe you’ll find time. I look at it as training sessions. Training of the eye and the eye hand coordination,  drawing from life. Yesterday’s object was me again, drawn from life, a picture taken in the factory with the ipad, and me trying to bring it down to paper.

Although water color is forgiving, in a sense, as it is transparent and translucent, still: Every brush stroke you make sits there. It is hard to correct a general mistake. But this adds fun to the exercise! Yesterday, I actually used a large brush, and tried to work fast, translating as fast as I could the picture on the ipad into a picture on the 30-20 canvas, trying to leave that part of the brain out that wants to understand.

Not action painting, but fast painting. With some stops in the middle, giving time to reflect nevertheless.

From time to time, I do comparable experiments with perfume, too. And, sometimes, I feel like these are hand-nose coordination exercises. The creative act there, however, does not happen when I mix, but when I write down the formula. And the hand is primarily used to type in words and numbers into excel.

And here’s what I find amazing: Many of these quick, and very spontaneous formulas are actually much better than the hard thought-through formulas. Often, they just need small adjustments, little corrections of mistakes. I guess, these formulas born in the moment or out of a moment are special.