Tutoring in Payerbach- What a Great Idea!

Look what I did! I’m so thrilled! – with both the process and the result.

My Spirit Calling Card reading 3 days ago was right.

I’m so glad I decided to contact two of my teachers, Vera Aichinger and Kuba Ambrose to host and tutor me for 2 days in their small town 89 km outside of Vienna. What a fruitful experience indeed!

I took an early morning train from Vienna to Payerbach on Wednesday, arriving half an hour earlier than arranged (regional trains in Austria are much more expensive than in the Czech Republic, by the way). This gave me time to take in the misty beauty of the place before Vera and Kuba met me at the station.

Their little house at the edge of town was about 15 minutes walk away.

It felt so good to be out of the city – one of my goals during my time off from school was to explore the Austrian countryside. When I remembered Vera’s invitation to come and visit them after they moved out here, I came up with the brilliant idea (if I say so myself) to hire them to tutor me, which would also help me with another of my goals: to improve my drawing/painting. What a win-win situation!

Kuba put together a 2-day course based on my inspirations and desire to improve my understanding of the human figure to then be able to stylize it into my acrylic paintings. I’m so grateful for all his preparations – he started with an enlightening presentation that helped me understand the impact and appeal of works by artists that explored the more graphic 2-D style (e.g. Mucha) and the blend of 2D and 3D (e.g. Klimt). He also talked about how the Impressionists used colour to create depth without the use of neutrals, something more in line with my current preference for bright colours. I then spent time before lunch working on copying one of Mucha’s sketches. There’s a lot of value in copying the work of masters – and it’s not as easy as it appears – not for me, anyway… So much erasing went into creating this very simple sketch. Learning to see where I had veered from his was in itself a great challenge.

I would be remiss in not talking about lunch… Although Vera was busy preparing for the Soul Painting class she is offering this weekend in Vienna, she cooked us a variety of delicious, abundant, vegetarian meals over the course of the 2 days. I definitely learned about creativity in the kitchen watching her work over the wood-burning stove beside our worktable. What a blessing!

After lunch, we went for a walk in the woods around their house and on the hiking path alongside the train tracks. I had to take their word for it that we were at the foot of the mountains. The fog never lifted enough in my 2 days there to see past the foothills. Still, it was gorgeous!

After feeding the wood-burning stoves (the house’s only source of heat), Kuba continued what Aloria Weaver started teaching me during my last couple of days in class. I had asked her to spend several hours one-on-one with me (and Edgar – our class skeleton) to help me understand how to draw faces. That was an invaluable start. Kuba took that a few steps further. First, I had some serious work to do to grasp how to translate all the parts into a dimensional-looking drawing. Feeling my face with my fingertips, I tried hard to imagine it like a landscape that my pencil would translate on paper. This was tough since drawing dimensional landscapes isn’t something I can do either. But through a variety of exercises, I went from drawing this …

to drawing this. Good work for my first day.

Since there was no heat in the house when I woke up early the next morning (and I was told that I might smoke up the place if I tried starting the wood stove by myself without a prior demonstration), I decided to stay warm in my sleeping bag covered by a very thick duvet, and spent time feeling my face and reviewing what I had learned the day before. With a lot more practice, I will achieve my goals! I just have to redirect my current obsession with free YouTube movies back to extra drawing practice 🙂

For my second day of tutoring, Kuba adjusted what he had planned based on my desire to translate what we’d learned into the world of painting. My task was to first draw a face from my imagination (and with a lot of coaching) onto watercolour paper and then to paint it. Using quick-drying acrylic paints, we approached this task in a similar way to the layering approach I’m learning with oils and egg tempera in class. I’ve only begun to understand the process in class, a reality that isn’t helped by the fact that it takes a week or more for some layers to dry, and therefore much too long between practical lessons for someone with my limited memory. Here, I was able to go from step to step, layer to layer, lesson to lesson, all within a day. Perfect! What I learned in my 2 days in Payerbach will greatly help with my in-class painting and beyond. I’m as sure of that as I am that what I have learned in my first trimester has helped with what I achieved here this week. Isn’t it great how life and learning work?!

With a very limited old-master colour palette, we first applied the whites and darkest shadows over an overall colour wash. We then accentuated the highlights and applied a dull greenish glaze to create what is called the “dead layer”. We then brought out some of the colour, highlights, and local glazes in a series of layers. I learned a lot about colour-mixing and blending in this process. It’s always been difficult for me to blend highlights to mid-tones to shadow without delineating lines. Again, practice will help here. It will also greatly help with symmetry. Try as I might, I needed Kuba’s eyes and hand to help fix the eyes – it took a while to figure out that both her eyes were looking in different directions – the difference a millimeter makes. Have I mentioned I’m an abstract painter? I am not inclined to precision in my painting as I might be in several other aspects of my life. Perhaps that’s why I find it so freeing.

Anyhow, by the end, I was thrilled with it all. As I sat on the 5:54pm train back to Vienna, looking at my finished painting, I found it hard to believe that I had created it. Yay! Thanks Vera & Kuba for a wonderful 2 days – it was also such a pleasure really connecting with like-minded souls.