How Annie O'Brien Gonzales Rediscovered Painting (20 Years After She Thought)
Annie O’Brien Gonzales stepped into a community college art class. And it wasn’t the homecoming she’d hoped for.
“My knees were shaking,” says the Santa Fe mixed media and acrylic artist. “I went in there and I thought, ‘Please don't call on me. Please don't call on me.’ I mean, I was just like a kid in class.”
Gonzales had studied art in college, but it had been years since she’d practiced art in any real way. She had a full-time job in higher ed and had raised a family.
“I had like zero confidence,” she says of coming back to art. “I thought, I've been out of it so long.”
Plus, her background was in oils and she wanted to learn acrylics, a medium that at the time she was in art school, wasn’t taught.
But here in this community college class, she looked around at a class of people younger than her. She couldn’t help but feel like she was starting too late.
But then something happened.
“Somebody said to me,” says Gonzales, “Don't judge yourself until you've done at least a hundred paintings.”
This idea stuck. “I was so determined that I started numbering them on the back.”
300 PAINTINGS
Gonzales painted and painted and painted. She’d paint a painting and then throw it under the desk. Paint another and then throw it under the desk.
“I bet I created 300 paintings before I ever liked one. Honestly, I didn't like them. I wasn't going to put them on the wall and I certainly wasn't going to show them anywhere. ...I just did them and put them in the closet, put them under the table, just kept going, kept going.”
And then something began to happen. Gonzales describes it as learning a language. You learn a bunch of words and then you string them together and then you try and say something in a foreign country but don’t understand anything anyone says back to you. But then
“But you keep at it and then pretty soon it's like this fog kind of clears. If you keep at it, then pretty soon you realize, you know, I actually do know how to mix that orange or actually can get back to that color that I really like. So your skills just start to build.”
BUILDING SKILLS
Gonzales slowly began painting paintings she liked. But soon she ran into another problem.
“I got to thinking, ‘I'm just slapping paint everywhere. I have no rhyme or reason.’” And it wasn’t working.
She would work herself into corners with acrylic paint and not be able to get out of them.
From her background in learning education, she knew that people learned better when they had reliable systems. She knew that she needed to come up with a way to approach her paintings that included a repeatable framework to help her see where she was struggling.
“It may not be everybody's way of painting,” says Gonzales, “but it's my way that I've solved, ‘how can you paint it with acrylic paint and always be able to work yourself out of a problem or out of an issue.’”
So she began to develop a system, one she now teaches in her classes, called the 7 steps.
She works to slowly build up a painting. Working dark to light, thin to thick, big shapes to small shapes. And at any point, if things aren’t working, this system allows you to make the necessary changes before moving ahead again.
THE SEVEN STEPS
1. Underpainting - Get color down.
2. Draw your map - 3-5 big shapes of the piece.
3. Blocking in - Add your darkest colors.
4. More paint - Begin to work lighter with more variation.
5. Analyze - Get your tea and think about your work.
6. Fix - Make adjustments including fixing your values.
7. Jewelry - Now the details.
This way of working did two things. First, it gave her direction for the next step. She could leave a painting at step 2 and know where she should head when she came back the next day.
But it also gave her a process she could trust. It gave her confidence knowing that if she walked through these steps (and didn’t skip ahead) she could trust that she was giving her painting the best shot possible.
“It's been really successful,” says Gonzales.
To learn more about Annie O’Brien Gonzales’ approach to painting, take a listen to her Learn to Paint Podcast Episode coming September 30th. Add your name below to learn when it comes out.