First published in the March 22 issueof The Mountain-Ear.

Barbara Lawlor, Nederland.

There is no right, no wrong.

Seeing has no end. It goes on and on until something in your brain, or your heart, tells you you’re finished. You just have to keep the door open long enough.

Artist Chuck Ceraso introduced himself to his students on Friday night and before they realized it, he had them under his spell; a way of seeing an image they didn’t know they were creating. It’s easy, he told them.

The 25 students were spread into a horseshoe formation in the multi-purpose room in the Nederland Community Center, easels and canvases propped in front of them; palettes to one side, tools to the next, plenty of paper towels and a paper cup full of water. An assortment of acrylic paint was available to each artist.

Many of those attending the art class had been there before and they sat patiently listening while Chuck explained the process; but fingers twitched, ready to apply paint to paper, ready to pull the images out of his head and change white space to color depth.

Ceraso has an art gallery in Longmont and his lineage traces back to the French and American Impressionists through his teacher, Henry Hensche, who was a student and protégé of Charles Hawthorne, whose first art school in 1900 focused on color discoveries of the Impressionists.

Ceraso is one of several people around the country who continues the style. He teaches to sold-out classes at the Denver Art Museum and at his studio in Lafayette. He has authored the book, The Art of Color Seeing, with his own insights into painting.

“After 40 years of painting, I’m more awed and inspired than ever at the challenge of painting. I’ve learned that to really see I have to let go of all of my ideas about what I’m looking at. A full presence of awareness is required for this seeing without thought, without ideas. This presence then seems to facilitate a more spontaneous process of painting, one unencumbered by a plan for a specific outcome. The painting has a life of its own and goes where the process itself takes it. In this, painting has become more an experience of revelation than as something I make happen.”

It is this philosophy that Ceraso suggested to Friday nights students at the TEENS, Inc. fundraiser. He stood in front of the half circle of artists and worked on his own canvas as he talked, gesturing with a flat brush. “Art brings out the fullness of humans, our nature to be creative,” he told the class. “The first thing to know is to paint things without thinking.”

He demonstrated this absence of intent by taking up his flat brush, gushing it into a glob of paint and then beginning to daub at the empty canvas. Fill it up, he told the class, use 16 different colors, or more. The students enjoyed finger food and wine as they contemplated their work. He watched the paper become littered with squishes of paint, some darker, some lighter, some streaks, some flat, opaque.

As the artists worked on their paintings, a former Chinook student, Tristan Kiefer, said that he had been working with the teen center since 2015 and decided to continue working with them, “to influence the younger people and their peers. When I was offered the job to work with younger kids, I took it, motivated by money more than anything else.” Now it is more than the money that is attractive, it is the accomplishments of the students.

It was time to step back and take a look at what had been accomplished on the canvases. He said that we think we know what the world looks like but when we take a step back, it is not so obvious” He told them to step back and look at their paintings. “These could stand up in the Museum of Modern Art,” he said. “They are alive, full of playfulness and freedom.”

Ceraso walked the class down the hall to where two paintings were hung, in the vicinity of around $400, explaining that the paintings were daubed and valuable, and so might their paintings be valuable. The students looked more closely at their work, seeing depth and light they hadn’t noticed before.

Now, Ceraso said, hang that up and get out a brush that would be good at making check marks. The students pulled flocks of flying birds from the widths of their brushes, fronds of palm, fringes of bark, mostly movement that threatened to break free of the canvas and find its own way around the room. The artists shared peeks at each other’s work, becoming more aware of the endless possibilities. They murmured to each other as they sipped wine and nibbled at sweet treats until it was time to move on, to put what they had learned together. One could feel the anticipation of working towards the finish.

But it wasn’t work. The group admitted they were having fun, that for a few hours, the rest of the world had slipped away and they had been totally engrossed in where their minds had taken them. Stress leaked from their fingertips and got buried in taupe acrylic; anger was isolated in a maroon slash.

The art workshops began a couple of years ago and were held at Salto, but the population outgrew the space and now even the multi-purpose room fills up rapidly.

Ceraso told the students not to paint things the “right” way. “Do what you see quickly and passionately. Tonight you can’t make a mistake. How do you feel when you look at them? Only you can answer that.”