I was cut from my high school softball team in tenth grade, I had a pretty good arm but could not field or hit. My remedial math teacher, also the coach, thus the embodiment of my shortcomings (algebra and athleticism), delivered the news in the middle of the day in front of my locker. I do not remember being crushed as much as having a vague internal question about what I would do with the resulting free time.
Turns out it was pointilism, of all random pursuits. The last period bell rang at 2:41 and by 3:00 I was at my basement desk with my micron pens, General Hospital in the background. Dot dot dot. Oprah came on at 4, then the news, but I hardly looked up. I spent hours making several pieces in the MC Escher vein (it was the 90's!).
I had an amount of patience that I would never have again in my illustration career. Painting watercolors is joyous. The zoning out of pointilism too. Illustration can be more tortured: trying to get a hand or a smile right, fitting everything in the frame, evoking the proper feeling. When I hear writers talking about writing, I think about illustration. The perpetual slog of hating everything, then the miraculousness of writing a poem or paragraph that you actually like. I could be drawing and erasing some tiny face ten times, whining and cursing inside, then when I get it right, it is a combination lock opening. Nothing causes more agony resulting in more happiness.
My ten year old son has the same angst. His approach to art is obsessive. He makes detailed battle scenes and sports tableaux. He will come home from school and confess that he was thinking about the angle of a leg that he was dissatisfied with all day and could not wait to correct it. Do I lie and tell him that the with the combination of patience and time, he will ultimately enjoy the process? I see so much of myself in him that it is not likely. We are who we are!
Do you remember the watercolor backdrops (particularly the skies) in the Peanuts movies? They were inky black, or cozy pink and dusky, or melancholic blue-gray and cloudless. I looked up the artist because they are so seared in my mind. They were all painted by Dean Spille, a concept and background artist. He was from California but lived in France mostly and passed away in 2021 at the age of 94. He did a perfect job of distilling a particular feeling, so much so that I have this feeling which I attribute to him each fall when I am looking at the sky that causes fifty percent less dread about shorter days (what is it-comfort? being warm when it’s cold?)
My daughter has jiu jitsu on Wednesday nights, while she is punching and grappling inside, I walk laps outside around the industrial complex while the sun is setting. Soon it will be too dark and cold, but now the sun goes down over the blocky buildings and a swamp, cornfield, empty parking lots and makes everything lit up and the few trees look like a charcoal drawing.
48 hours in Charleston, with its secret gardens and lovely people. Even the frat houses are charming.
New York Botanical Garden, January 2023
Our insane natural world! I bought a tiny Venus flytrap.