When we imagine a painter in our mind’s eye, we might picture a person in Breton stripes delicately balancing a wooden palette in one hand, a pencil-like paintbrush in the other, with a pair of round glasses resting at the very tip of their nose. When they begin to paint, their wrist swishes around in comically large movements, the paintbrush flicking dramatically after every stroke.
As young artists, we might have copied this imagined technique, only to find it resulted in unruly splatters of paint and ink across the canvas or paper. The idea was to create beautiful, naturally sweeping movements with a sense of texture and precision, yet the reality was a veritable mess.
