Unquiet
Things

There is no photograph of this, as far as I know. My mother is gone, and my grandfather Boppa, and my grandmother, and just about all of our elders, and whatever documentation existed of those years is in several boxes in my sister’s houses, and anyway, this was a picture never taken. But I don’t need a photograph. My memories of it are vivid enough…I just sometimes wish one existed so that I could have a bit of proof to show myself, see! See, you once did this!

Me and my sisters at the kitchen table, drawing paper, crayons, the serious bent-head posture of children doing extremely important work. We drew little people with their little clothes and little towns and elaborate little scenarios for them to inhabit, and we made our people talk in high-pitched voices that Boppa would tease us about every time he passed through the room. It was a super huge, major part of my childhood. I loved to draw!

In second grade, the illustration of my sneakers went up on the wall for parents’ night. In sixth grade, our art teacher asked us to draw our houses, and I, thinking aspirationally, kept sneaking glances at the tattered Amityville Horror paperback I’d hidden in my desk and drew that instead. The teacher was impressed, whether by my draftsmanship or my delusion, I can’t say.

And then, somewhere not long after that, I stopped.

There was a very specific moment. I was a kid who doodled everywhere: notebook margins, assignments, the brown paper bags we cut apart to cover our textbooks. One day, someone asked me what I was doing and why. I couldn’t explain it, and the question made me feel ashamed and strange, like I’d been caught doing something that required justification I didn’t have, and furthermore, I didn’t know I needed. The surest way to deter me from something is to embarrass the crap out of me. So I stopped, just like that.

I’ve caught myself thinking that I should have been encouraged to take art classes in middle school, high school, college, and I catch myself on that “should have” every time. What I guess I mean is that I wish someone had noticed something that gave me joy and said, keep going. Not really because I needed external permission to pursue it, but because I was a kid, and kids sometimes need someone to see them before they can see themselves.

Maybe this is how I eventually came to writing about art instead of making it. Art, like anything or maybe everything, is a practice. If you don’t practice, you don’t improve. If you don’t do it at all, the muscles atrophy, the instinct dwindles, and returning to it, or arriving at it for the first time, really, gets harder. I have known this for years. I have written around it for years. I love art so extravagantly, so helplessly, that I found my way to it through the door I knew how to open, which was language. I became someone who writes about the things I could not bring myself to make.

But there has always been something in me, some part of me that knows there is a marvelous, extraordinary thing inside and wants to let it out — and maybe that is drawing and maybe that is writing, and maybe I still don’t know what the creative hole even is that lets my light into the world.

When we moved to Jacksonville, we made new friends, and one of them gave me a box of secondhand creative supplies: stamps and stickers and journaling things, some of it never used. We started having craft days. I began in the shallow end, coloring books and zentangles, before deciding I was going to pursue my actual childhood dream, which was drawing flowers. I bought a lovely flower-drawing guide, collected tutorials, and I have been practicing for months now. Alongside those kaleidoscopic zentangles. Cut-and-paste surrealist poetry collages. Decorative journaling.

I tried to go slow at first. (as this was meant to be developing a practice, not acquiring a collection, and I know how my brain works when it comes to gathering supplies as opposed to using supplies.) I will admit the journal stack has grown exponentially, and I have gone from someone who didn’t own a single marker to someone who now has half a dozen boxes of them… and also colored pencils and watercolors and pastels (So, you know. “Slow.” Hehehe.)

Another thing I started doing that makes it not scary for me: I am a quasi-hermit who doesn’t do much, which means my daily planner has historically contained entries like “take pills, pay bills, wear sunscreen.” Not exactly a rich chronicle. But on the same page alongside the basic to-do list, I’ve started doing a small illustration a day, practicing what I’ve been learning in a low-stakes way, because it’s just a doodle in a planner and not expensive art paper, which is really intimidating! Just a little drawing next to “lift weights.” (Which somehow never gets crossed off the list.) It keeps me in the practice without the pressure of treating it like capital-A Art.

I know it sounds cheesy, but…my life has felt richer? if that’s the right word? these past few months. Getting over yourself, all the inexplicable shame and embarrassment, and flabby, languishing art muscles, is a hell of a thing, and working on these projects is fun and freeing. In a way that writing (which I love and hate in equal measure sometimes) is absolutely, definitively not.

Last week, Yvan and I were watching something on YouTube when Lucy needed to go outside to pee, or poop, or perform some unknown third dog operation, and when we came back in, he asked if I wanted to keep watching. No, I had to get back to my project. “My art is very important,” I loftily informed him.

Yvan nodded sagely (because he is on my level and he gets it.) “That sounds like something you should write about,” he said. He’s right. But immediately after I do, I am gonna draw a flower about it, too.

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