Bless This Mess

I have been awake since six AM.

I do not believe my body knows what is best for me, I do not believe that it takes care of itself. If this were true in any way, why would I have woken up and not been able to continue sleeping? Why would I be watching and re-watching Breaking Bad while it's still dark out?

I think I have anxiety. I'm not..sure what that means. It means that when I'm on a plane and it hits a patch of turbulence, I finally feel at ease. Because when my chest seizes up, it is finally justified. This is not easy to admit. This is, in fact, very difficult. To feel like your mind is unraveling for reasons unseen. To feel as if you can't trust your emotions (I have found this to be particularly true, I have never, ever been able to trust my emotions, they always have led me to histrionics, have always led me astray, they are figments of imagination and not kernels of truth).

It's raining this morning. I used to sleep best when it rained. This might have been before my dad got sick. Before I was consumed by writing. Before when I was careless, young, my concerns were ridiculous to me now. I'm not sure what my concerns are now, but they seem less ridiculous. They seem to need more concern. I painted a portrait I really liked recently. I could tell the model wanted it. He kept looking at it, commenting on it, smiling at me. Maybe he was trying to pick me up but I don't think that was it. I rarely think that is it any more, and it means nothing more than it doesn't register on me at this time. I am on some sort of strike. A romantic strike. I refuse to believe anyone would want to be with anyone, let alone me. But, back to this portrait. It's oil and my teacher says it's the best one I've ever done in her class. It finally shows the light. I squinted until it was all blurry and I only painted the light parts. I left the dark alone. When I was done the model talked to me, he smiled at me. At another point I would have liked to talk back to him, but not really now.

The paint was wet and it got on my hands. I could tell he wanted something from me, when people do, and they almost always do, they can never keep it a secret, can they? Maybe the painting, maybe a conversation. It was all I could do to smile politely. He wanted something, sure. Something I had. But I wasn't going to give it up, because sometimes I think we all feel we have so little. Happiness is finite, perhaps, we hold on to what we're able to. He kept grinning and I packed up.

I thanked him and went on my way.

Wednesday at The Frick

I'm back in class and that means more stories, more searches for color, more drawings that I'll upload for comments, more running around with grubby hands, snatching gallery guides so I can troll the streets searching for openings, art, but perhaps most of all, free glasses of wine.

In the Frick, we spread out, armed with our sketchbooks and assignment--three drawings, and mix it up this time--and we have an hour and forty-five minutes. Spend it wisely.

Don't stand in the gift shop like me and marvel at what is around you: the walls lined with postcards and black and white prints, enormous books against the shelves: the jackets in the boring muted tones run together. Hotel buffet salmon-pink, sea-scum green. Silk-screened totes and wide pine floor boards.

Shake it off, clutch your book and keep moving, past the crowds of slow-moving patrons, the arguing Russians, the surly staff who by now must find no beauty in what they do, protecting priceless things from us--loud-mouthed tourists we all are in this room where we ooh and ahh.

Grab your pens, scratch and the pad and scowl as you desperately try to sketch this relief of Mary, find yourself shouting out the name of her son as you slip and screw it up. Compose yourself, keep going, scratch scratch scratch for twenty minutes, leaving scars in the paper where you've gone too deep, and then, a 70 year old woman who is shouting out everything that comes up on her audioguide, leans over and tells you "that's kind of good," and you can't help but stand a little straighter and scratch a little louder as if someone will see.

Next up get the pencils, look in the dog-eared pages of the book and choose the next page--do you dare to draw on the back of a good drawing at the risk of affixing something mediocre to something you'd be proud of, knowing full well that if you do, someone could always flip the page and all that they thought of you could be erased in an instant.

Say to hell with it, go on and do it, retreat to the dining room and draw the chandeliers, feel all right about it, then draw the door and irretrievably screw it up and again mutter the name of Mary's son and then look at your cell phone and see that time is up, and you must show what you've done, which is not much.

But it's okay to do not much when you're surrounded by so much. It's okay, because you keep trying, because you think, with no sentiment at all, that you love this in a way. You love art even though you are no genius and you'll never be. And also, that love is a true one, because you are getting nothing back and still you do it because some day you believe you will.

Pictures to come...

Self-Portrait

What was important never is when you’re standing in front of an ill-lit mirror, trying to get your nose just right using broken graphite, the first time in a long time you really looked at your nose at all, you think, and you have to draw it because your art teacher said we’re going into portraiture and you wished to draw someone else, clandestine, but you were scared to start, scared to not finish, if that someone else, whom you did not know, turned to you and then away from you.

There is a glance between two people who do not know each other, a moment of invasion and of topical knowing that is private, rare, by the rest of the world’s standards. Maybe in a supermarket, maybe briefly at a red light, maybe years and nothing like it at all. But here, it’s every day, multiple times, and here people do not even try to avert their eyes, they stare, you stare back, you both go on for subway stops, steps, eons like this, and you see everything and say nothing, even though you could have stepped forward and introduced yourself. Even though you could have approached them, like the new kid on the block forced to ring doorbells and ask if any kids reside inside, you could have done this, you could have made a connection and yet you did not. You will not. And they will not approach you in return.

What you do get though is that moment from your perspective, whatever it is worth, which is probably nothing, until you are standing in front of yourself, tearing up another page because it does not look like how you think you do and you see how you look to someone else, maybe everyone else and it amazes you how small you still are, and yet how much bigger you have yet to grow.

Where I don't belong...

There’s something about the smell of an art room that makes me wish I could fold myself into forever, where my hands are always ink-stained, where the ground is scarred by chairs dragged to the furthest wall to touch the imprint of someone else’s masterpiece.

Maybe because it feels ageless, timeless, as our best instructors have been dead long before we were born and wanted to feel clouds of sepia chalk in our nostrils. The quiet, the weird, they all have their places on the top here, their talent trumps their mastery of the language and we feel each other’s weight on the page. We make up what we can’t see until we can.

I have not completed any of my homework and I will be back in that room tonight, averting my eyes from someone’s bare body until I can see his shadows. I’m finding the exercise due incredibly daunting and so I’m looking into my keyboard, trying to pull out words from numbers, hoping to draw a blank in my mind and a little inspiration. In my office it does not smell like paper and pencils and acrylic, instead it smells of someone's re-heated Lean Cuisine which has carried down the hallway from the shared kitchen, and at this moment, I am very sorry for that.

Baby Art

There was a time, between the ages of eight and eleven, that my parents thought, for one shining moment, I might be a prodigy.

Parents always think that.

Usually it means nothing. For me it meant art lessons.

Here are my "baby paintings" -- paintings, drawings, and etchings I did under the tutelage of a talented, tortured artist who covered her walls in beautiful, terrifying and enormous paintings of war and suffering and fire. Great way for a fourth grader to spend her Monday and Wednesday afternoons right?

Please tell me I didn't peak at ten. That would be a new low...

The City's Oil

When I’m on them, trains never leave, and when waiting, they never arrive.

The subways are stuck in a gelatin of immobility.

At arm’s length I hold a oil from class, knowing full well that it takes days to dry and leaves an impenetrable stain when lightly brushed by clothing.

I attempt to share the knowledge with the other riders. I think first to tell them it’s fresh paint, so their concern to keep my glowing picture intact will make them keep their distance. But that thought soon vanishes from my mind. What I tell them instead, is what really concerns them. That the paint in question will destroy their designer handbags, skinny jeans, vintage T-shirts, and supple suede in less time than it took for said shoppers to slap down the plastic to buy it.

They keep their distance.

When the train finally chugs into the station nearest my apartment, I step off in a rush, to breathe a bit less-stale air, to bound up the stairs, and to bring my painting home, where after dry and after scrutiny, I’ll toss it under my bed because it’s not good enough.

The doors open and I jump out, clunky and weighed down from my box of colors, my portfolio bag digging deep into my shoulder, inhaling low, only to remember. This is the spot, the exact spot, where no matter what time on what day it is, it reeks of heavy, acidic urine.

I stop inhaling. I hold my breath, shuffle up the stairs as I’m swept in the crowd, and try to keep the painting away from everyone’s outfits, though a pusher in a hurry, elbows several people before getting to me, and slams his way past, smearing his hand on the picture.

Because of the crowd, it’s tilted again, this time smearing me, my skinny jeans, my vintage T. I cringe. I left my smock in the classroom because it was too wet and too big, and far too unfashionable to ride home in. As if anyone would have cared.

Watercolors were meant for New York, for the subway. Pencils, pastels, ink. Recycled sketch pads. Quick drying, easy to move, fast, fast, fast.

Not oil. Oil is slow, slow, slow.

Oil was meant for the landscapes of Chile and Scotland, the portraits of royalty and their pearled lace collars, plump fruit and flowers bunched loosely on a starched tablecloth, figures swathed in cotton or bathing in green waters and sunshine.

Oil was not meant for me, not for the subway, and not for New York.

Art #3

A History of Color

“Who can tell me what this is?”

The freckled strawberry-blond before us lifts a glass jar filled with small, clinking brown bits. He’s here to talk shop to a bored class. The traveling salesman from Windsor & Newton comes bearing ancient powders and free sampled paints. Pigments, primaries, the works.

“Crushed, they make this color; carmine.” The shock of crimson paint he smears on a gessoed page is a translucent and bloodied red.

“Seeds?” Ventures a cute sophomore with feathered bangs and feathered earrings.

He tips the jar forward, spilling onto a blue paper towel. “Sort of.”

She brings her face closer to the pile. “Wait. These seeds look like bugs.”

They are.

He illustrates by smashing a glass weller onto them, smearing the page with their corpse dust. After a dip of linseed oil, the red runs from their dried shells. He tells us the color is still made just as he's shown today; the bugs are grown by eggs hatched, then harvested, on cacti.

The next illustration is Indian yellow-culled from the crystallized urine of overfed cows, gorged on mango leaves, their urine stained a deep acid tone. That practice, he tells us, has since been banned once the British left India. Animal cruelty.

The final demonstration is for Mummy Brown, what used to be made from the mummified bodies of desert dwellers. It blotted the pigment a rich gray-earth. As an aside, we learn all black clothes were dyed with the charred remains of slaughtered livestock, their bones sold from refineries and farms.

“Where did you think the color came from?” He asks, incredulous at our surprise. “This happened until little more than a hundred years ago.” We never had thought of where the color came from, because we never stopped to question or care. Now, we look down at our black vinyl drawing bags.

We’re told we can be our own mixologists, like mad scientists in the days of patroned artists and crushed jewels for colors, in an East Village shop to fashion our own pigments. Glass beads, marble dust, and anything else can be added for texture, for glimmer.

He tells us this is the history of color. That if one wanted the use of one, one had to go out, find it, and somehow bring it into paint. That we are so lucky for what we have now, to live now, to exist as would-be artists now. A book upon the table displaying the graphic eroticism that got one Chilean artist arrested and banned many times in his short life of twenty-five years illustrates his points.

The strawberry-blond tells us that if we were to bring a new color to Windsor Newton today, and they found it viable, they would make it.

But he truncates our budding imaginations for color crusades with this. Unique chroma (his wording) is very unstable, very volatile, and very untrustworthy. These colors cannot be often recreated, they cannot be counted upon to stay deep and bright over time, and they do not react like other, more common hues.

They flash in a short time, and fade away afterwards, leaving no remnants of their former selves to generations in front of us.

But still, I'm in search of one.

Art #2

Lessons from the Studio

Hands raw from compressed and vine charcoal, gummy kneads and conte...I wonder of life lessons. Can I glean what's true in the world from what renders true on the page?

The figure forms before us; open blinds, errant hairs, cellulite be damned. Her preferential stance is an arched neck, strong thighs and splayed hands. Her face, permanently fixed in a scowl. We're meant to draw her weight, her effort, her insides out. We're intimate, eyes to soul, until her timer beeps twice.

She's traded for a man my father's age as the clock strikes four. I am the only one immature enough to smirk when he scratches his ass mid-pose.

The professor implores us, take each section learned and fit them together like interconnecting puzzle pieces. We're to build from one to the next, never fully forgetting the last, though it's impossible. She says everything we'll ever need to know in life, we'll know at the end of our stay in the eighth floor studio. In here, the lights buzz, fixtures are smeared grey and we're all students once more.

My fingernails are dirty, jeans spattered with ink. Across the room, a regal speech writer has a deep smudge from nose to ear.

So much escapes me when I look for it. Life lessons, what could they be? Striving for beauty is striving for truth, perhaps. Learning to see instead of assuming what we know. Finding the aesthetic in the weird, the ugly, the ordinary.

Smearing a beloved sketch when asked only to draw an inferior one in its place seems as though it teaches nothing at all.

The models shifts into an energetic gesture at the professor's urging, spread-eagle on a chair, pointed fiercely at me.

I'm beginning to see. Perspective, inner energy, the importance of averting one's gaze from another's genitals...

One can learn so much about life from within the art studio.

Art