Hakodate Shed 01

Story and paintings by Lehan Winifred ramsay

Sometimes I paint a picture, and after I’ve finished I pull up another canvas and paint it again. No looking at the original object or photograph this time, and sometimes I paint straight on without drawing anything first. It bends the picture in a direction. Of colour or shape, some kind of warp. It’s always easier to start something with something. It gives you what you want. Then as you go along you figure out what you don’t want. I don’t want a shed like this, that’s clear to me. I want some other kind of shed and in my second picture I’m sliding a little over to it.

People call up to ask about classes. They’ve read a little about them in the paper. But then if they start describing the classes they want on the phone, they don’t sound anything like my classes. They sound like – they sound like that second shed. I offer to send them a flyer, and smother my exasperation. No I am not going to make an individual shed for each student who walks in my door. I don’t have enough hours in a week to do that. It is not possible to provide customized and attentive entertainment. What I want to do is to have each of them walk in here for an hour, and walk out again having expanded their learning and their capacity to learn a tiny fragment, in reasonable comfort. I want to know not that they are having a good time, but that they are picking up a skill. And that is all.  Sheds are complicated, different things for each of us. I provide the shell. Four walls, a roof, a floor and a door. And they can make whatever they want out of it.

Hakodate Shed 02