A dahlia bud doesn’t question whether it should take the risk to unfold and bloom, it just does. Yet we tell ourselves it’s a risk to step outside our comfort zone to grow and develop as a person. Perhaps taking risks is just a state of mind?
This gently opening pompon dahlia bud (Dahlia hortensis) was one of my very early attempts at using watercolour to paint flowers, having started out using coloured pencil. I’m amazed at how bold I was to take the risk and give it a try considering everything I’d read suggested that watercolour was a difficult medium to master. Add to that the fact that this was a poster sized artwork and I wonder now whether I’d actually lost my senses! However, reflecting on this painting has reminded me of the necessity to take risks in life and step out of our comfort zone if we want to continually learn, grow and change.
Whether it’s the acquisition of a new skill or some aspect of ourselves we aspire to develop further, it’s necessary to do something new and different to make these things happen. Becoming a novice again when learning a new craft can be a confronting experience if it follows an art or vocation in which you have achieved a high degree of mastery. But it can also be an incredibly enriching and rewarding experience if we can bring ourselves to accept the blank slate as a canvas upon which to shape something new and exciting, both literally and metaphorically.
It took time and a leap of faith for me to move my fledgling interest in botanical art of the 18th and 19th centuries to one where I wondered if I could give it a try myself. It was the glorious flower illustrations in Sandra Knapp’s beautiful book ‘Flora: An Artistic Voyage Through the World of Plants’ that inspired me to ask myself the question. I had absolutely no background or experience in art, having always believed I was behind the door when artistic ability was handed out, so to take that next step was way beyond my comfort zone.
On my first foray into drawing, I pulled out an old set of coloured pencils and tried to recreate a sprig of rosemary from the garden, but that was a dismal failure and ended up in the bin! Not to be beaten, I visited a local bookstore in the hope that I might find a volume to guide me, and clearly the stars were aligned because displayed right there on the shelf as I walked in the door was Ann Swan’s excellent book ‘Botanical Painting with Coloured Pencils’. It took a few further attempts to cobble together something that looked like a flower, and it makes me laugh now when I look back at these artworks but also pleased that I persevered through the most frustrating moments and thoughts of throwing it in because I felt my artworks weren’t good enough.
Along the way I became inspired by large scale paintings of the inner detail of flowers, and as my own works gradually expanded in size, I became frustrated by the amount of time it took to work large areas in pencil. I’m not a particularly patient person, and the weeks of work required for the task disheartened me causing me to lose inspiration and momentum. It was this that facilitated me to take the next step out of my comfort zone and explore the use of watercolour washes for large expanses of petal colour.
Well, I didn’t quite know what I’d taken on, and I can assure you there were many disastrous attempts until I got a bit of a handle on the basics. Fortunately, there were times when the initial washes went totally awry, but I was able to retrieve the painting using my trusty coloured pencils and a lot of patience.
By the time I was ready to tackle the glorious magenta dahlia bud, I’d been dabbling with the use of watercolour for more detailed work in my paintings as well, but it always felt like a huge risk to begin using an unfamiliar technique on a half finished painting. In one stroke of the brush, it could turn from success to disaster. However, I pushed ahead with the dahlia and kept the paintbrush in my hand for as long as I possibly could, but the finishing touches eluded me, so I resorted to pencil for the final markings on the bracts, sepals and petals. I forgave myself for taking the easy option because I knew that sometime I would need to take the risk to learn how to paint detail with a brush, and like the young bud opening to a new world, in the process of trying I’d expanded both my capacity to move into unknown territory and my technical skill with a paintbrush, no matter how rudimentary it was.
Although I’ve worked exclusively with watercolour for about three years now, I’m still learning so much about the medium and the skills required to do it well, and have a long way to go yet I might add. I’ve started painting backgrounds in some of my more recent works, and this is the most challenging risk I think I’ve ever taken with my paintings because I like to get a feel for the finished flower before deciding on the most appropriate context. It’s with great trepidation that I put down those brush strokes for fear of ruining the many hours of work it’s taken to complete the flower!
However, there are times when I wonder whether the mindset that we are taking risks is a really just a way we choose to think about something that we consider new and therefore challenging. This is most likely driven by fear because moving into unknown territory can be a bit scary as it brings unfamiliar experiences, and if it requires the acquisition of a new skill, then fear of failure or that we’re simply not good enough can also haunt us. Sometimes the fear can be so strong that we choose to completely avoid trying something new and miss the opportunity to grow, change and enrich our lives.
So, perhaps we can take ‘a petal out of the flowers book’ and just go ahead, step up and ‘do it’, allowing ourselves to unfold as we’re meant to into a beautiful soul rather than spending unnecessary energy telling ourselves it’s a challenge to take the risk or letting our fears overcome us. Why not choose to see it as fun and exciting to embrace something new, and in the process become a more fulfilled and enriched version of ourselves?