I was nervous about painting with Leslie. It’d been years since I picked up a watercolor brush. The day before, I spent three indecisive hours at the art store trying to pick out the right supplies that would match my romantic, Merchant-Ivory film notion of plein air painting. The next morning, Leslie and I met up inside the Garfield Park Conservatory. I painted, timidly so, and watched as Leslie’s brush worked swiftly and intuitively with no second-guessing, joyfully wedging shapes and color combinations into gorgeous compositions. I had recently read about “flow,” the term coined by psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi to describe a heightened, immersive state of positive productivity, and I wondered if Leslie was experiencing it. After our date, I went home and made some drawings and thought, “Is this flow? How do I get to flow? Should I ask Leslie?” Flow came, eventually, once I stopped being so conscious of it. Also, chocolate helped. And thinking about the way Leslie’s brush moved.
January 16, 2019
Garfield Park Conservatory
