What Painting Teaches You About a Place

You’re listening to Tide and Light. Episode Four. There’s a small harbor on the east side of the Big Island where I once spent two entire hours trying to paint a single fishing boat. Not a fleet. One boat. It was tied up at the far end of the pier, an old wooden thing, blue along the hull, with a name painted on the side that I couldn’t quite read from where I was sitting. And I had decided, the way you decide these small stubborn things, that I was going to get it down on paper before I let myself go find lunch.

So I sat on the warm concrete with my little pad and my eight colors, and I looked at the boat, and I thought, this will take me twenty minutes. Two hours later I was still there. And the strange part, the part I want to talk about today, is that somewhere in those two hours I realized I had never actually looked at a boat before in my life. I’d seen thousands of them. I grew up near the water, I’ve spent years around harbors, I could draw you the idea of a boat right now with my eyes closed. But I had never looked at one.

Not the way I had to look at this one, where every guess I made was wrong until I stopped guessing and started seeing. I’m Lily Mae, and this is a show about travel and art and the slow beauty of living intentionally. Last time I talked about the strange thing travel does to your creative work, how being somewhere new hands you your eyes back for a little while. Today I want to go one layer deeper into that, into what happens when you don’t just look at a place but try to make it with your own hands. Because I’ve come to believe that painting somewhere, even badly, even terribly, is one of the only ways I know to actually understand it. Okay, so let me stay with the boat for a minute, because the boat taught me most of this.

When you photograph something, the whole transaction takes about a second. You point, you press, and the machine does the looking for you. It gathers every detail whether you noticed it or not, and it hands them all back to you later, flattened and equal, and you scroll past most of them forever. The camera is generous that way, and also a little bit of a liar. It lets you believe you saw something when all you really did was stand near it and collect it. Painting doesn’t let you do that.

Painting makes you choose. You cannot get the whole boat, so you have to decide what the boat actually is. Is it the blue. Is it the way it sits low and tired in the water, like it’s earned the right to. Is it the reflection breaking up underneath it, which is not blue at all but a dozen colors I didn’t have names for until I was forced to mix them. You sit there and you fail, over and over, and each failure is a question the place has to answer.

The first hour I got the shape wrong, again and again, because I was drawing the boat I knew instead of the boat in front of me. I kept making the front of it too high and too proud, the way a child draws a boat, because that’s the idea of a boat that lives in my head. And the actual boat was humbler than that, heavier at one end, patched, a working thing and not a symbol. I only found that out because the paper kept telling me I was wrong. That’s the thing a photograph will never do for you. A photograph never argues.

There was one moment about an hour in that I keep coming back to. The sun moved. Just far enough that the side of the hull I’d been so carefully painting one flat blue turned, in the space of maybe ten minutes, into three or four different blues at once. Cool and almost gray where the shadow of the pier fell across it. Warm, nearly violet, where the low light hit it straight on. And a thin band of pale silver right down at the waterline, where the glare came up off the water and bleached the color out of it entirely.

I’d been painting the boat as though it had a color. And it doesn’t. Nothing does. Everything I had ever called blue turned out to be a hundred passing colors that my brain had been quietly averaging into one tidy word my whole life, so it wouldn’t have to keep track. The boat wasn’t blue. The boat was blue at ten in the morning, for about eight minutes, in that particular weather, and never again.

And I only know that because I sat in front of it long enough to watch the word I’d brought with me fall apart. Somewhere in that second hour I started noticing things I would have sworn weren’t there when I sat down. The name on the side had been painted over an older name, and you could see the ghost of the first one bleeding through underneath, a different word, a different hand. There was a child’s flip-flop on the deck, just one, pink, and I found myself inventing a whole family to go with it. The rope holding the boat to the pier had worn a smooth pale groove into the wood over what must have been years, and the groove told you exactly how the tide moved here, up and down, up and down, a thousand times, long before I ever sat down to look. None of that is something you decide to see.

It arrives because you’ve been still long enough, and looking hard enough, that the place stops hiding its ordinary details and simply lets you have them. And here’s the part that surprised me, the part that made me want to build a whole episode out of a single fishing boat. The looking didn’t stop when I put the paints away. For the rest of that trip, I saw everything the way I’d been forced to see the boat. I walked back into town and I noticed that the paint on the doors was a different blue than the paint on the boats, greener, saltier, and that somebody a long time ago must have mixed those colors on purpose to go together. I noticed the exact height the ocean had left its salt line on the walls of the buildings near the water.

I noticed which houses got repainted often and which ones were left to fade, and what that quietly told you about who was still there and who had gone. I hadn’t painted any of it. I was just carrying the painter’s eyes around town, and the town was suddenly full of information it had been offering the whole time, that I’d walked straight past on my first two visits. And here’s what really got me. The next year I went back to that same harbor, and I didn’t paint at all. I’d left the little kit at the house on purpose, just to see what would happen.

And I could still do it. I sat on the same wall and I looked at a different boat, and with no brush in my hand at all I made myself stay in front of it the way the painting had taught me to. Got the shape wrong in my head, corrected it, found the ghost of an older name, noticed the one small object out of place, all of it, just slower and quieter and with nothing to show for it afterward. The painting, it turned out, had been a kind of training. It had taught my eyes a pace, and once they knew the pace, they could hold it on their own. That’s the part I didn’t expect.

I thought the looking lived inside the painting. It turns out the painting was just where I learned it, and I get to keep it now, everywhere, whether I’m making anything or not. This is the thing I most want to say today, and it’s for the people listening who would never in their life sit down with a set of watercolors. You do not have to be an artist for this to be yours. The painting was never really the point. The looking is the point, and the painting is just the thing that forces the looking, the way a hard question forces you to actually think instead of just reacting.

Trying to recreate something, by hand, slowly, is a way of asking a place to tell you the truth about itself. And it will, if you sit there long enough to hear it. I’ve started to think of it as the difference between seeing a place and observing it. Seeing is passive, and fast, and mostly your brain matching what’s in front of you to what it already expects. Observing is slow, and a little effortful, and it means you’re willing to be wrong about what you’re looking at until the thing itself corrects you. And you can observe without a brush in your hand, I promise.

You can do it by trying to describe a street in your journal in enough detail that a stranger could stand in it. You can do it by picking one small thing, one doorway, one tree, one face at the market, and refusing to move on until you could draw it from memory. The medium doesn’t matter. What matters is the decision to stay in front of something past the point where your brain says, got it, next. Because got it is the lie. Got it is the exact moment you stopped seeing.

I’ll give you one more, because it’s the one that changed how I travel the most, and it’s harder to admit. It works on people too. When you paint a place, you learn to look at it without deciding what it is first, and you can do the same thing with the people in it, if you’re brave enough. Most of us, when we travel, see people the way we see a famous view. We match them to an idea we brought along, the friendly local, the grumpy shopkeeper, the character, and then we stop looking, because we think we’ve got them. But if you hold still the way the boat made me hold still, the idea falls apart the same way the word blue did.

The woman at the market I’d quietly filed away as stern turns out to be shy, and then, once I’d come back a few days running, warm, and then, once she trusts me, funny in a dry way I’d never have guessed from the face I would have photographed on day one. I was never seeing her. I was seeing my idea of her. And the cure is exactly the same as it is for the boat. You stay. You look.

You let the actual person in front of you correct the picture you walked in with, over and over, until you’re seeing what’s there instead of what you thought you already knew. I want to be honest, though, the way I always try to be. My painting of that boat was not good. I want to be really clear about that, because I can feel this turning into a story where the reward for all that looking was some beautiful piece of art, and it wasn’t. The proportions were still a little off. The water was muddy where I’d overworked it.

If I showed it to you, you’d be kind about it, and you’d be being kind. But it did the only job I actually needed it to do, which was to make me spend two hours truly present in one small corner of a place I love. The painting is almost beside the point. It’s the receipt. It’s just the proof that the looking happened. And years later, I can close my eyes and see that harbor in a level of detail I have for almost nowhere else I’ve been, because I’m the only person I know who sat in front of it long enough to be wrong about it forty times.

So here’s the small thing I’d invite you to try, and it really is small. The next time you’re somewhere you want to remember, pick one thing. Not the famous view, not the whole sweep of it. One boat. One window. One tree at the edge of the parking lot that nobody else will ever look at twice.

And try to make it. Draw it in the corner of a napkin, describe it in a notebook, whatever you’ve got. Do it badly. Do it so badly you’d be embarrassed to show anyone. And then notice what the place hands you in exchange for the ten minutes you spent actually looking at it, instead of collecting it and moving on. Next time, I want to talk about doing nothing.

About unplanned, unscheduled, apparently useless hours, and why I’ve come to think they’re the most valuable time you can possibly spend somewhere. Because it turns out that nearly all the best things that have happened to me while traveling arrived in the gaps I almost filled with a plan. That’s where we’re going. You don’t have to paint well to paint usefully. You just have to look long enough to try. I’m Lily Mae.

This was Tide and Light. Sit in front of one small thing long enough to get it wrong. I’ll see you next time.