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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