Wine & Paint Leipzig: Women’s camaraderie in a dark hour

I used to say I could not draw or paint to save my life. Except for a few digital symmetrical shapes on Windows Paint, or stick figures and squiggly lines vaguely resembling a river on a notebook. Yet on a recent Saturday night, I perched myself high up in the Post building stabbing at a canvas for over three hours at an event named Wine & Paint Leipzig.

My multi-brush, multi-color stabbing got so intense that the charming woman across from me at our long table of aspiring painters felt compelled to reach out:

“I’m dying to see what you’ve been working on!”

I got so excited over her interest in my tortured brainchild that the water where the paintbrushes were resting ended up all over my side of the table. Her facial expression quickly turned from intrigued to sheepish as she helped me sop up the mess with a paper towel. Then it turned to slight disappointment at the anticlimactic sight of my entirely green-brown canvas.

So much of contemporary art seems to be about the title of the piece subverting its face value that I could have offered her a mildly thought-provoking, or at least confusing, title.

Instead, this is all I could come up with:

“I’ve started a new version on top of what I was working on before.”

I stood up and asked to see hers. Now it was my turn to feel sheepish. A beautiful beach scene. No wonder so many people had been stopping by to snap photos of her canvas, unlike mine.

In fact, everyone whose pieces I’d caught a glimpse of at Wine & Paint seemed to actually know how to paint, except for me.

My “painting” at that stage felt to me like a green-brown stain in a sea of seamless gradient skies, starry nights, and constellations of realist human or animal subjects.

My fault. I should’ve known that Germans, or the German-adjacent, wouldn’t come out and spend their Saturday night toiling away at a canvas aimlessly. I’ve been on plenty of weekend hikes and bike rides with Germans, and two words come to mind: Purposeful. Nimble. The two words I’d use to describe myself in all of the above situations would be “stumbling along.”

Nee. I’m too clumsy and random to ever fully integrate into this society. You can also hear it in the way I speak in spurts and still routinely fudge declensions after 12 years in Germany.

To continue with the try-hard generalizations: The words “dressed up” and “in Leipzig” may sound like an oxymoron, but dress up they did for Wine & Paint. I tried to, as well, after watching their Instagram reel of a past event in the series, elsewhere in Leipzig.

Although I didn’t notice any dancing at the November 9th event I attended at Felix Restaurant, some still kinda looked like they were going to a nightclub with their posse. Most of the participants were women and most did not attend alone; I was one of the exceptions.

Music was playing all evening in the brightly lit room. At some point I may have heard some live singing but couldn’t see the performer. Or maybe it was just a really crisp-sounding stream. I’m not sure.

To be fair, I was barely looking up from my canvas once I’d gotten “in the zone” at Wine & Paint.

Which is not to say I knew what I was doing. While others seemed to purposefully pull up models on their phones, I summoned up symmetrical shapes from the dusty mental archives of my Windows Paint days.

My “technique” consisted of first drawing on the canvas with a pencil, without a particular theme in mind but with plenty of inexplicable optimism about the end result. Then I painted around my geometric shapes with one of the larger brushes, creating a sort of window, and making twirly patterns. Finally it was time to try to trace the lines with a finer brush.

I hesitated. Oh boy. This was gonna take a while.

“How long can we stay here?” I asked one of the Wine & Paint organizers.

“As long as you’d like,” he reassured me.

Despite so many participants being dressed up, the atmosphere was really chill. The Germanized part of me would say, almost too chill. I personally would’ve appreciated a brief visit from a Bob Ross type to show me how to produce something at least resembling an artwork.

I’d also have appreciated being served some “liquid courage” at the table; you had to go and get the wine part of Wine & Paint yourself, and I didn’t bother because I didn’t want my creative flow to be interrupted. The “welcome drink” I’d grabbed at the entrance to the room was quickly gone.

What you do get “served” at your table is a cup with water for the paintbrushes. Everyone also gets one smallish (portable) canvas, a paper plate for the paint, and as many dollops of acrylic paint and paintbrushes as supplies will allow.

You get to keep your painting if you’d like, and I was determined to do just that.

However, for the first two and a half hours, I put no purpose behind my ambition. I kept hopping on over to the supplies table and squeezing blobs of random colors onto my paper plate and grabbing random paintbrush sizes.

During some of my quick trips to the supplies table, I’d look around at what the other, more talented aspiring painters were doing. But not long enough to take meaningful cues for my own endeavor. While the broad strokes on my canvas didn’t look terrible, I had trouble with the fine lines. I didn’t know how to make the colors thick enough without adding other colors, or the lines precise enough.

I finally scrapped my original idea (geometric shapes) in frustration, furiously sliding the largest brush across the canvas. Suddenly, I was faced with what my imagination told me was a stormy sky. The clouds parted and I found a theme.

Donald Trump had won the U.S. presidential election the Tuesday prior. This had been sitting on the back of my mind all along.

I guess it just needed a stormy sky to come to the fore at Wine & Paint.

For the new incarnation of my piece, I mixed some more colors until the canvas turned brown. I used one of the smaller brushes to trace the female gender symbol. Then I brought back broader symmetrical shapes to create what looked like a window frame. Some more brushstrokes with white and I had different shades and shape nuances.

The scene turned out to be basically the stick figure of a woman trapped in the dark behind a window, surrounded by a dark structure much bigger than herself, but still looking out. Below I painted a “death date” (for women’s rights) in red, dripping in “blood:” + 11/05/24.

I don’t think it’s a good painting but somehow I felt like I owed the woman across from me some sort of result for her kind interest, so I called out to her:

“I’ve got something now. Look.”

I turned my canvas around, this time without knocking over the water cup. Her facial expression instantly turned from curious to slightly saddened:

“It’s a bit of a depressing scene.”

Yes. That’s the spirit!

“It’s about Trump’s election and what it means for women,” I explained.

“I see,” she replied, wistfully. “I’m originally from Russia. The situation is no better there.”

The Russian woman saw I’d been sitting there alone waiting for the paint to dry while others engaged in photo shoots with their art buddies. In a final act of kindness, she offered to take a picture of me with my piece. I said maybe I’d see her at the next event, emboldened by the little bit of validation I was getting.

“Good—a political piece,” remarked another woman, who’d come up behind me asking about the theme of the painting. Though my favorite comment probably came from my German husband, to whom I sent a shot of the finished product:

“It’s no worse than most contemporary art.”

He dislikes most contemporary art. But I choose to take it as a compliment.

Next Wine & Paint dates

• 6 Dec 2024 Höfe am Brühl Leipzig TICKETS

• 18 Jan 2025 Felix Leipzig TICKETS / GIFT CARDS

• 15 Feb 2025 Felix Dresden TICKETS