Lifelong Pursuits: An Affair With A Creative Passion
The assignment, as I remember it, was to write about a lifelong passion*. That was at least two years ago. Quite simply, I didn’t feel like I had devoted enough continuous time and effort for any interest of mine to qualify as either ‘lifelong’ or a ‘passion’.
Few things come to mind that have stuck with me through every stage of my life, but the process of creating art would have to top my short list, closely followed by writing. That order hasn’t always remained the same, by the way, regularly flip-flopping and often intertwined like the fingers of lovers holding hands.
My first art 'masterpieces' date back to when I was about four years old, but I don’t remember them personally. How many times has it been said that beauty is in the eye of the beholder? My mother saved a watercolor of a clown face. I have no idea if that was what I was really intended to paint, or if that was just her interpretation of my finished portrait. My father preserved a drawing I’d done on a chalk board by photographing it before I erased it. I’m assuming the coil of curly hair perched on the top of the round head suggested a worthy attempt at a self-portrait.
Finger-painting in kindergarten is something I do recall and I loved it. Pushing the thickened paint across the surface of slick paper was tactile heaven. If the public school system had allowed five-year-olds to pick a major field of study, that would have been it for me. My other clear memory that year was receiving a personal box of eight chunky crayons. I printed my name in clumsy block letters on the outside, claiming ownership, and guarded them possessively. Playing with the arrangement of the crayons, I discovered they looked ‘perfect’ if I laid them out in a precise order: red, orange, yellow, green, blue, purple, brown, and black. This was so esthetically balanced to my eyes, but I worried the order might get mixed up as I used them and I’d never figure it out again. So I carefully lifted each crayon out of its assigned position, one at a time, and traced a line with the corresponding color on the inside bottom of the box. I now had a placement chart where each of my precious crayons belonged. (It would be an understatement to interject that I have been known for obsessive tendencies and a rather serious nature my entire life.)
I decided I might actually be an artist (someday) by the time I entered third grade. The class had been studying birds and each week we were assigned a different bird to draw. The teacher instructed us to leave the finished drawings out on top of our school desks, then walk around the room and vote for the best one by slipping a one-inch square of construction paper under the drawing of choice. Two of my drawings were voted as top favorites and my inner child is still very proud of that recognition from peers.
My interest in creative writing developed a little later. I always enjoyed reading and became intrigued with the notion of being the one actually doing the writing by the age of 12. I begged my parents for a typewriter for Christmas and imagined becoming a famous, well-paid screenwriter (of all things). The dream of being published was thrilling. Meanwhile, trying to imagine actually having a painting of mine hanging in an art gallery seemed more remote and too much to even hope for. Maybe I should have considered becoming an art critic, because I was certainly hard on myself.
I painted a few canvases during my childhood and teenage years. My mother was a pretty decent artist and I inwardly believed I could never match her skills or earn her approval, so I tended to avoid it. But deep inside I desperately wanted to paint. I saw images in my head all the time that pleaded for me to allow them to flow onto paper. Most my attempts resulted in frustration and dismay. I saw things a certain way and couldn’t duplicate them with the accuracy of my mental images.
The art classes I took in high school were basic. It was then I realized that my continued practice of arranging art supplies in the same color sequence as I had done in kindergarten matched what my first year art instructor was referring to as ‘The Color Wheel’. Since I saw this instinctively, I couldn’t understand why it, or color mixing, had to be taught at all. Over the next three years I ended up advancing to pottery and commercial art to learn something new, but never took any painting classes.
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