30 before 30: #15 Paint on Canvas

The sea of science-heavy courses I waded through in the last two years has incited my neural cortex to tap into networks it has never used before. It has been an amazing experiment because somehow, someway I defied my english lit and political theory-trained brain and became a scientist. And while this is all very surprising and exciting, it also can be... extremely boring.

In my school electives, I never once took an art class. I remember taking a clay class and a drawing class at the Lafayette Community Center but I believe I was all of 6-8 years old at the time. This personal history is probably fine and understandable since the bulk of my creative energy has always been elevated in my writing and I showed no particular aptitude for art. But now I'm an adult who never took an art class.

Enter Beginning Painting.



Despite being enrolled in the most time consuming class known to the medical field this semester (Organic Chemistry), on Monday afternoons you will find me in Berkeley City College's fifth floor art studio alongside a fantastic conglomerate of overweight scraggly gray haired hippies, fresh out of high school dark lipsticked hipsters, buttoned up eyeglassed asians, and a few oakland-raised black athletes who need an easy A to keep their scholarships (all of this would be racist if it weren't true). Between the demonstration on how to make paint from dandelions you grow in your back yard to artsy fartsy videos that describe process to spending a few hours at Blick Art wandering around with my supply list to having the actual space and time to just TRY, I am profoundly stimulated.



Stimulated, yes. Good at it? Absolutely not. I'm a god-awful painter. What a glorious place to be when there is no real consequence to failure.