Sometimes people tell me they admire my courage. Sometimes these people are idiots who don't know me and are casting projections based on all kinds of their own desires and ignorance of the real world in general, some of it willful. Sometimes, though, people who do know me, very well, actually say they admire my courage, too.
Courage, as every adult knows, has nothing to do with not feeling afraid. Courage is what compels you to do things even though you are afraid because you know they are the right things to do. I do have some of that, even though sometimes the results of my acting with courage aren't very nice and make my particular brand of courage look like stupidity. Oh, well.
The biggest problem I have with my own courage is that it is unreliable. It will balk and hide at the lamest things. Take drawing in public, for example.
I am terrified of drawing in public. I do not know why. Well, I probably do know why, deep in myself, and it's probably embarrassing, so I never take that terror out and examine it in any depth. I just try to override it.
It's silly for me to be afraid to draw in public. What on earth do I think will happen to me? I am a professional artist. People have actually paid me cash money to make art, both fine art and commercial art, sometimes quite a lot of money. I have skills. I have vision. I may even have a genetic predisposition, as I am third in a slightly indirect series of professional female artists in my family. My great aunt Hilda taught my mother Stephanie. My mother taught me.
But I am afraid. I think I'm afraid of ridicule. And if you do know me, you probably just splurted coffee at your screen, because ridicule is not usually something I fear.
I have voices in my head. They're not the kind of voices that indicate a need for thorazine or haldol; they are wholly imaginary, though they may come from somewhere real, not the result of a chemical imbalance or "an undigested bit of beef." They are insistent, though. They make clucking noises with their imaginary tongues, and their voices are sneering and dismissive.
They tell me I can't draw.
In my studio, I play the radio or CDs or listen to things on the internet to drown out these voices while I work. Otherwise I never would work. They're still there, of course, but with other people, real people, talking or singing, I don't pay attention.
I think I fear these voices becoming real, corporeal, when I attempt art publicly. I don't know why I should care. I do care, though.
I am not self-taught, and I'm not an outsider; in fact, I find the term "outsider art" insulting on many, many levels. Although I dropped out of two art schools -- very much in part though certainly not only because of my fear of creating art in public, maybe especially in front of other artists, even students -- my mother taught me color theory, perspective, and helped me understand why I wanted to bother in the first place. She guided my sense of composition and exposed me to art she admired by artists living and dead. I didn't get here on my own, and I am not an outsider, because I belong, I belong to a chain of women who make art, a net maybe, though I only know of us three who have been paid for it in my family. Besides, art is a drive, not really something you can be taught. Technique is something teachable. Enthusiasm, too. So, I think is fear. Fear is what makes walls that push people outside.
My mother did not teach me to draw. She taught me to hold pen, pencil and brush, and I certainly drew before I feel I really learned to draw, which is a sentence I know doesn't make sense to other people. I learned to oil paint before I really learned to draw, easily sculpting images out of layers of color. Photography, once I learned to use my camera and a darkroom in art school -- which is pretty much all I learned in art school, actually -- was a snap, if you'll pardon the pun. But drawing, drawing eluded me as a skill, not an accident, for most of my life.
I feel I didn't really learn to draw until I was 30 years old and heard something on the radio, on NPR, about making the connection between what you see and what you create on paper. The person speaking said that when you draw a tree, you are not drawing a tree; you are drawing the shape of a tree. And you're not really drawing that, either. You are drawing the shape of each patch of light that makes up what you see as that tree.
Hearing this was like having a switch thrown in my head. I'd always struggled with replication, you see. I was always trying to draw what I saw, I thought. But I wasn't really even aiming at what I really saw; I was really trying to draw what I could name as a cohesive whole. I needed to break it down into shapes, and draw those. Shapes of light. Shapes of dark. Shapes of each color.
Suddenly, I got it, after all those years. And I was never afraid to just sit down and draw something again -- except I was, especially in public. I never completely believed that I couldn't draw again. And part of me now knows for certain that I can draw anything I want -- and that you can, too, incidentally, if you can just learn this little trick for looking at things in shallow pieces as well as a whole. But I can still hear those imaginary jeering voices telling me to give it up. And I still expect to hear them, for real, every time I try to make art in front of other people, not just in public, out in the open in a world filled with potentially judgmental strangers, but sitting around a table with my friends. I am afraid to sketch in stick figures to make a point. I'm afraid to draw a pie chart to explain something concrete, because I'm afraid my circles won't be round enough, my pie pieces won't point into the exact center of the pie.
It's that bad.
This fear of mine is not constructive and even has the power to paralyze me. I actually love making images better than anything else in the world, except maybe looking at other people's. So I fight it. I make myself dare to make things. Sometimes I even dare myself to do it publicly.
Every year in Newport, Rhode Island, an opportunity arises for me to place that dare. The opportunity is an event called Wet Paint, which is where artists come from all over, collect a free lunch provided by a fine area restaurant and a T-shirt provided by Benjamin Moore early in the morning, and then go paint somewhere outdoors and local for about six or seven hours. The artists return bearing fresh works of art they have created in the field that day, and the works are exhibited and then auctioned to benefit the Newport Art Museum.
I have taken the dare four times. I didn't last year because that summer, the summer after we'd just moved, was chaotic and unsettled, and because my true love couldn't accompany me, and I didn't feel comfortable enough driving long distances alone yet. I didn't go this summer because my cat was dying, I was broke, and things were still chaotic. I do not know if I will have the courage and the lack of real, valid excuses to go again. But I did go four years in a row, including the summer before I had my leg cut off and the summer after. And every time I went took some guts, because truly, I was terrified each time.
The first year I went, I didn't photograph my work because I only brought black and white film. I went with a young student friend of mine. We spent too much time locking down locations. I didn't dress correctly, think about time, really consider technique. Her art was beautiful; mine was crap; but it all sold to benefit the museum.
The second year I went alone. My young friend and two others were supposed to come, too, but they all flaked out. I was almost too afraid to go by myself, but I made myself anyway. I signed in, drove around quickly looking for a place to be, and landed after only about half an hour on a segment of the Cliff Walk that bends right in front of The Breakers, the Vanderbilts' summer "cottage." I was entranced by the rosa rugosa blooming all over the cliffside; flowers bloomed and were eaten by Japanese beetles while I watched, almost too fast for me to draw them. Where I am from, it would have been prickly pear and sage or iceplant, and the only danger would have been children. I got horribly sunburned, eaten alive by bugs, and though it sold for a nice price considering its size and state of completion, I just wasn't able to finish the piece because I just got too dehydrated sitting on concrete in the full August sun. (Click above image to enlarge.) And people actually spoke to me while I worked. And though sometimes they said stupid things ("What you ought to be painting is those dogs. They're hilarious."), mostly they said nice things. They wanted to know what that plant was. They could tell what I was painting! And some had stories. One elderly gentleman told me he'd been married in that exact spot.
The third year I dragged my true love along. If he hadn't agreed to come along, I would not have been able to go. I was very, very ill. I had to rest in the car between breakfast and finding a location, and my true love was the one who found the location in the end, Brenton Point State Park, a place where people go to fly kites, and where a business called "Go Fly a Kite" sells elaborate kites of which it flies samples in groups on long, long filaments. I sat with my back against a tarry railroad tie that divided the grass from the parking lot and was immediately sucked into the scene before me, a sky sea of fantastic creatures and colors floating and trailing and whirling far overhead. The only voices I heard were seabirds calling, people playing, and the very occasional person stopping by to look at what I was doing and -- again -- offer encouragement. Not sneering! No one sneered! People could tell what I was painting! And they liked it! And I got sunburned, and I got bug-bitten, and my boyfriend got bored, but the painting sold. (Click above image to enlarge.)
The last year I also dragged my true love along for what was supposed to be a romantic weekend. I had just gotten a prosthetic on which I could rely a couple of months before, and I had only just stopped using my cane. I was afraid to leave because one of my cats was very sick (dying, actually; it's been a rough three years). I was afraid my cat would suffer and need me (he did), that my true love and I would fight (we did), that I wouldn't be able to manage all the strangeness (but I did). (Click above image to enlarge.)
I learned that I could clamber through mud and up and down hills. I learned that I could go up and down extremely steep hills with uneven pavement. I learned that I could use a restroom that wasn't tricked out with special access considerations, like rails. I learned that I could wear a miniskirt in public and look people dead in the eye, daring them wordlessly not to find my face. And I learned that I could navigate a dock, a jetty, a gangplank, and a catamaran and go sailing and get drunk on mimosas while standing in the bow looking at all the blue ocean and sky and laughing, same as always.
It was a grey day, the day reserved for painting, and we visited nearby Greenvale Vineyards, where there were kind people, adorable shaggy highland cattle and butterflies. The greyness seared our retinas, my true love's, too, as he had also brought drawing materials, just for his own pleasure. We had scoped out this location the day before, to save time, but on the day, we got wildly lost, for hours, which was one of the reasons we fought that weekend and which did not give me enough time to more than sketch the beginning of a painting I would have loved to have filled in more.
Almost no one walked by. No one saw what I was working on, no one told me I was doing well or poorly or should paint something else, no one told me stories. I was tired and angry at my love for getting lost. I could hear those obnoxious voices loud and clear, and they flummoxed me, truly. (Click image below to enlarge.)
It was the first time I had had the luxury of attending the cocktail party and exhibition the museum holds once all the paintings are turned in. We went and looked at everyone else's work. Mine was hardly the worst there, but also hardly the best, and it was one of obviously less finished works. I was embarrassed. To top it all off, the drinks were terrible, made with the cheapest liquor and lots of it.
The painting sold for more than any of my previous entries in this auction. And I haven't been back for two years.
It's not that I'm afraid, though I will be once I try again, and then I'll get swallowed up in the process if I'm lucky, and then I'll be euphoric that I went through with it. I have painted on location before. There was that time when I sat by my true love's bedside while he recovered from a gall bladder surgery gone awry, worrying whether he'd live, really angry that it had happened the way it did.
Some people knit.
I never unpacked my kit from the last time. I still have all my favorite colors, a small pad of paper, eraser shields, a brush, masking tape, fixative, and all the other little gewgaws that make the pictures come out of my fingers, all neatly tucked away in a multi-pocket messenger bag I got from The Walking Company. I have a little folding trail seat, and I live in a beautiful place. I could start this up again any time, without Wet Paint. I could just make myself go outside and paint here, and it would be good for me.
All I need is a proper dare to give myself, and the courage to take it.
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Reminder: You only have 7 hours, more or less, to enter my midway contest! Nothing ventured, nothing gained.
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