Test Case: From Filing Briefs To Fine Art — Painting Isn't All That Different From Practicing Law
Columnist Allison Peryea reflects on the similarities between two seemingly dissimilar fields.
By Allison Peryea (click to enlarge).
A few years ago I started taking painting classes—the kind with the eight-week syllabus rather than the glasses of wine. My first class, an introductory course on oil painting, was taught by a judgmental hipster woman with blunt bangs and thick-framed glasses. She wouldn’t give much instruction because she didn’t want to affect our “personal style,” as if we had somehow developed such a thing in the few short weeks of the class.
Discouraged but still hopeful, I signed up for an acrylics class at a different art school. Acrylic paint is the mother’s milk of impatient people like me: Oil paints take hours to dry, and you can’t easily paint on top of wet oil paint. In contrast, you can dry acrylics with a blow dryer (yep, they are plugged in around the studio) and easily cover up mistakes with this white stuff called gesso, which looks like a jar of marshmallow fluff but doesn’t taste like it.
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Having found a creative medium that speaks to my deadline-oriented lawyer’s soul, I fell in love with acrylic painting and have taken several classes from the same instructor. These days, I just show up and work on my own projects, which are mostly paintings for friends and co-workers, who dutifully display my artwork in their offices like I am their 30-something-year-old kid.
Some of my classmates comment on what a contrast it must be to practice law by day and then spend the evening painting. But I have learned that—despite what you might assume—being a lawyer and creating fine art isn’t all at different, except that I don’t normally wear paint-spattered fun-run T-shirts to the office.
Just like navigating a case, while painting, you have to make decisions all the time that will affect your results. You don’t just sit in front of an easel and let your creative juices flow through your paintbrush: Instead, you have to block out the darks and lights—called an “underpainting”—and choose and mix colors to help you depict shapes and shadows. Indeed, completing a painting can feel just as mentally taxing as finishing a citation-heavy legal brief—and you sign your name at the bottom with the same combination of pride and relief.
In both the art studio and law office you have to work hard not to get ahead of yourself to focus too much on the outcome, which can create frustration and self-doubt. There are going to be mistakes and you are probably going to have to change course at some point. When painting, you suffer from those same fears you have as a young lawyer or when confronting a new, unfamiliar matter: What if I can’t do this? What if I am bad that this? Who am I kidding? There is always a point for me during a painting when it just isn’t looking like I hoped it would—last week, for example, I had to keep repainting a cat’s mouth because he kept looking like a leering letcher, more akin our current president than a cute kitty—but you just have to trust in the process. Like a drawn-out lawsuit or negotiation, there are going to be ups and downs and miscues, and you have to just keep moving forward.
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But sometimes you do get stuck, and in both practicing law and painting it helps tremendously to have a good mentor. My painting instructor, Thea, always spends a part of each class analyzing my painting to give advice about perspective or new techniques to show texture or pattern. You don’t always know what you are capable of until you have someone help show you what you are doing wrong and ways to fix it or make things better. Though some people like to lone wolf it in the studio and the courtroom, the end result is often stronger with a group effort.
By Allison Peryea (click to enlarge).
The great thing about painting is that—just like a particularly memorable case in your legal career—all of the mistakes and complications end up making your painting more interesting. I used to slap out a painting during a single class session, but now I learned it is all about adding layers upon layers, with the old work peeking through. These days when I give a painting to someone, I have to resist the urge to tell them: “This painting took 17 hours to make, which equates to about $5,100 in attorney time.”
In both arenas, you also have to know when you are done. Some people spend hours refining a legal brief, when at the end of the day “good enough” and “perfect” will get you the same result, except the latter will cost your client a lot more money. Similarly, in the studio, some people fuss with their paintings even though they seemed complete hours ago. It can be hard in both instances to let go and move on.
Another similarity with painting and the law is how each person has a different approach to getting things done. When I start a painting, I like to cover the canvas with sloppy blocks of color, and then slowly refine things. It can start out looking like a second-grader’s finger-painting project. Other people carefully march across the canvas from corner to corner, with each completed area looking perfectly finished. It’s hard not to compare your process and your work to others, but just like in the law, you have to remind yourself: We are all competent, or at least working on getting there.
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And lawyers and painters both have to wrangle forests and trees. A complex case can seem overwhelming until you really get at the crux of the issues. Likewise, a painting can seem like an incoherent mess until you step back and look at it from a distance. Indeed, sometimes I step back and take a photo of my in-progress paintings to get a better sense of the angles and contrasts. That’s how I knew my cat looked like a creep with a broken nose last week.
For me, painting is like entering into a new world, with new terminology and tools and techniques, and people who don’t know what they are doing and people who walk around like they invented the art of painting. Swap out the paintbrush for a legal pad and it can feel pretty similar to the practice of law. In both contexts, the learning curve is steep, but with practice things become more instinctual, whether blending paint colors or negotiating a settlement. The key is to just keep forging ahead.
Indeed, maybe both painters and lawyers are artists. We just use different mediums and wear different outfits.
Allison Peryea is a shareholder attorney at Leahy Fjelstad Peryea, a boutique law firm in downtown Seattle that primarily serves community association clients. Her practice focuses on covenant enforcement and dispute resolution. She is a longtime humor writer with a background in journalism and cat ownership. You can reach her by email at [email protected].
