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Noodles: A true history.

This is the story of a potato.  No, I’m kidding, it’s not (though I do have a potato story...remind me to tell it sometime when it sounds less boring).  This is actually the story of an artist.  Specifically, the story of me, as an artist.  A metamorphosis story, if you will.  It began a long time ago, on an unknown day, when I was first given a marker.  I drew an astonishing picture.  Because my parents failed to realize its monetary worth at the time, it has been lost to the crumbling echoes of history.  However, here is a wan representation: 


If you’re weeping from ecstasy now, take a minute, get a Kleenex, have a sip of lemonade, calm your fluttering spirit, and then read on.  
Recognizing true talent when I saw it, I groomed my natural gifts until they shone.  Or, rather, glowed.  I had a keen eye for color, a delicate taste for nature’s palette:


Finding paltry inspiration in the natural world alone, I turned my starting eyes and tingling fingers to a nobler subject - the human frame, itself.  I made a specific study of the human mouth:


Years passed, and when it seemed my talent could find no higher peak to climb, no subject worthy enough to subject itself to, I climbed still higher, and made a shocking discovery.  I can’t draw worth beans.  Hands, in particular.  But also people, places, and things.  I’m okay at Pictionary but physically incapable of drawing a straight line.  And you know how artists talk about shadows and light and hoity toity la dee dah oh mymymy?  It’s a foreign language.  I decided that since I couldn’t draw like anybody with a grain of self-respect, and couldn’t do a decent watercolor to save my life, I was a complete failure.


 I had reached a plateau:

Only to take a bit of a fall:

From which I’ve been recovering ever since.  I trudge grudgingly in the path my younger feet flew up, carrying my own baggage and making crude sketches in the rocks as I go.  On the heights above me struggle the toiling artists who have gone before, palettes and charcoals and stencils in hand, muses singing above them...and below me I see the world spread out, flat and expressionless, orderly and self-contained, reminding me that an artist is only as great as she allows herself to be.

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