A thing I like about finger painting is the feeling of the goo on my fingers.
Paint brushes feel too much like pencils, which remind me of how messy my handwriting is and how judgmental my teachers were about that. I never really liked to write anyway. Words constrain me, even paint brushes constrain me.
A thing I like about finger painting is that nobody really expects it to look like anything. It’s all about the emotions. Red means passion. Yellow means optimism. Green means joy. That’s how it feels to me, at least. And the colors can change their meanings depending on the strokes, or the other colors around them, or how thin or thick they are on the sheet.
With a paint brush, I feel like I’m supposed to draw something. With my fingers, I can just bond with the goo sploching and splurching against the paper.
A thing I like about finger painting is the way the paint clings to the paper, squeezing it up and warping it until the two merge into one thing: Not paper anymore, but paper with finger paint. Not paint anymore, but paint on paper.
That feels to me how I’m supposed to feel about graphite on paper. That’s what my creative writing therapist told me when I was young: That I would like writing better if I thought about how I was taking the thought out of my brain and bonding it to the paper with the pencil.
But the paper doesn’t really change. It remains flat, with only the slightest of etchings. Turn the paper over and you can hardly tell it’s been written on.
Not true with finger paintings. Stack the dried paintings together and they resist flatness. There is no mistaking a painted sheet for a blank one.
A thing I like about finger painting is the mess. As a left-handed person, pencil writing leaves its reminder on the edge of my hand, as I blur my print while I write over it. But that is a grayish silver scar, a reminder of how writing tries to bond with me but fails.
Finger paints are everywhere, though. With a brush, the goal is to avoid putting paint anywhere other than the canvas, but with fingers, nothing escapes. There is no point to wearing clean, fresh clothing; there is no point to worrying about clean, fresh hands. The chaos is the art. The art is chaos.
Chaos originally referred to the primordial time, before things became formed and everything had to become its own thing. Fingers in paint on paper lets me reconnect with that chaos. I can abandon the structures and strictures of modern civilization and touch the inner core of the universe.
And that’s the thing I like most about finger painting.
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