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Vino pairs delightfully with painting at Pinot’s Palette

My relationship with painting is the equivalent to eating gummy worms while drinking a Yoo-hoo: It seems fine on the surface, but they don’t work well together.

But a glass of wine or two tends to make things better — the painting, not the absurd sugary combination — and make the art fathomable.

I came to this conclusion after taking a last-minute adventure to Crazy Pita at Town Square Las Vegas, 6605 Las Vegas Blvd. South, for Pinot’s Palette’s Paint-Drink-Dine charity event on July 14.

These painting-and-drinking classes can be fun. If you’re a novice at painting, or art in general, these gatherings are perfect. Sure, there are people sitting around your area who treat each piece like it’s the Sistine Chapel while you construct your Picasso-like assortment of colors, but don’t let them discourage you. Be there for the fun and to give back to a good cause, like Pinot’s Palette did on this day for the Josh Stevens Foundation.

But most of all, if you’re bad at painting like me, you should laugh at yourself and have fun with it every time.

The task at hand was to draw five wine bottles on this approximately 20-by-24 canvas. It seemed reasonable. Bottles especially don’t seem too difficult if you grasp the basic concept of the alcohol you drink at home or at a fancy French restaurant. When you break it down, however, and begin an in-depth creation of what you thought was reasonable, those wine bottles start to become random blotches of paint that could come off as bottles of beer or hot sauce — if you’re lucky.

That’s the path my art was going down by the time we got to bottle No. 3. I understand my limitations as an artist. Even if I try to create a bottle of wine, I know it will certainly not look like a bottle of wine by the time the final drop of paint dries. These fermented, 2-D bottles of grape vino were beginning to look like oblong skateboards that would be considered hazardous on any form of pavement.

It was a mess.

Then came the time to paint on bottle labels. Again, it seemed simple — take the white paint and cover a portion of the bottle with a square or rectangle. That was probably the cleanest part of my painting. They actually looked like decent four-sided quadrilaterals, ready to be tackled with more paint. That’s where everything went off the rails.

Any slab of paint that could get on that white space went there, and it looked like a smorgasbord of color that made angels sing and babies smile. (Notice the heavy self-ego boosting I just attempted.) The painting went off the rails, and I swiped the brush with intention to get color on there in a non-purposeful way.

The wine bottles did not look like such, and I further realized why writing is always the first option. Nevertheless, it’s a fun activity, and everyone should try it at least once. You have to try really hard to go wrong with paint and booze.

To reach View copy editor Danny Webster, email dwebster@viewnews.com or call 702-477-3834. Follow him on Twitter: @DannyWebster21.

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