Mediocre

Saturday morning, cold and grey. Jonah and I pushed five boxes containing files from my dissertation to the far corner of the attic. The boxes were crowding out the windowseat. Someday I’ll have the guts to chuck those boxes out the window down three flights to splat on the driveway, but I’m not there yet.

I vacuumed up the dead flies from the windowseat and brought my easel up from the basement. I opened up my shopping bag of new oil paints from Pearl Paint and arranged them neatly in a row. Titanium White to Crimson.

Jonah very excitedly asked that his drawing table be brought upstairs to the attic, as well, along with his little drawers of crayons and markers. He understands the importance of a good studio.

There are lots of things I think I am very good at. I am very good at public speaking. There are lots of things I am bad at. You absolutely don’t want to hear me sing. I have no problem with those extremes. It’s the things that I do so averagely that bother me.

I am an average artist. Now, I can draw nudes and still lives and they will look like they are supposed to look like. A vase or a body or something. I can get the lines and color and shadowing mostly right. But it is just isn’t inspired. For years, I took classes at the Art Students League of New York, which is a hard-core artist place. Thick with the smell of turpentine and smoke from the third floor smokers room. Nude models ran up and down the stairs.

For a long time, it bothered me that my end product was always middling. Accurate, but not inspired. Why was I wasting time doing something that I wasn’t great at? If I couldn’t excel, why bother? Isn’t there something embarrassing about being average? Then I realized that, for me, it’s all about the process. When I’m painting, time takes on another dimension. I think about nothing but the paint and the model. I’m almost in a trance. Three hours and the model packs up to go, and only then do I remember all those million things that are bothering me.

I had to stop when I got pregnant and never got started again. It’s been seven years. I am looking forward to making some very mediocre paintings again.