When I was in Junior High School I had an art teacher who was by all accounts a nice guy, however, recently I’ve had cause to question just what kind of a teacher he was. My first art class was all about basic form, so, essentially, all about drawing. Shortly into the term – less than I month I think – he pulled me aside and told me that while I was a bright student and a terrific writer from what he had seen I was not, nor ever would be, a classic artist and that I should find something else. He generously made me his T.A. for the rest of the term and I passed the class and moved on; occasionally crafting but eschewing anything that could be taken as art.

Years passed and I honed my writing skills and cooking skills and I’ve even got some mad glue gunning skills but time and time again I would skip anything more artistic than a coloring book for fear of having to show my sad artists abilities. I would instead joke that I couldn’t even draw good stick people (and I can’t, my stick people are terrible – they kick puppies and shoot heroine and piddle in the street).

About 6 years ago while I was working in a call center for what I refer to as The Evil Empire (a shall-remain-nameless wireless phone company that thrived on breaking their employees spirits, sucking out their souls and slurping them down like Jell-O Shots). I was in need of some tension relief and something to do with my hands all day so as to avoid the ever tempting parade of crap-food and treats that passed by my cubical.

In a parking-lot-adjacent retailer I found my temporary salvation in the form of Play-doh. No joke. A little four dollar package of generic brand, non-drying, modeling clay helped me both retain sanity for a few months longer while working in telemarketing hell and helped me get in touch with the neophyte artist who had crawled into a mental hole to die a little over two-decades ago.

I started out making the only thing I knew how to make with Play-doh – little rose like flowers, which I nearly perfected during endless hours of playing with my young daughter. Not surprisingly the allure of making 100 little flowers a day quickly wore off and I decided to try my hand at a few other things. The guy who sat in the cubical across from me had these little dragons all over his desk, so I tried making a dragon.

It took me two days and about 732 caller hang-ups to make it look anything at all like a dragon; the finished result was a bright yellow dragon-esque-caricature. The dragon hoarder across from me promptly took it off my computer and put it onto his; I considered this a compliment and went on to make several more dragon-like creatures who were doing everything from fixing computers to riding motorcycles. Within a few weeks fellow employees were offering to pay me to make little dragon vignettes for them – that’s right, offering to pay me to make desk tchotchkes for them out of Play-doh.

After leaving The Evil Empire I went on to discover Sculpey oven-bake clay and fell in love. Making little clay creations became one of my favorite forms of personal therapy, something I did just for me, although I sold several pieces over the years though a local shop that took work on consignment – one must pay for their craft somehow.

Shortly before Thanksgiving, 2010, the strangest thing started happening to me. I woke up one morning from an exceptionally vivid dream – as a lucid dreamer that’s saying something – where I was in a large room filled with canvas. I recall waking up from the dream just as I had finally decided to pick up a paint brush. One does not need to be intimate with Freud’s The Interpretation of Dreams to figure out what this might mean. All day the thought of painting stayed in the back of my brain, wheedling at me like a tiny splinter. I knew that I would be on my own for the holidays and as I went about my duties and chores a little idea started to take shape. I kept thinking to myself “why not”? I had no plans and no one to please but myself for several days, I had paints and brushes for my clay work, all I needed was a canvas.

Two days after the dream I was out picking up personal care products for my daughter at our local Big-Lots store when out of the corner of my eye I spotted what looked like a piece of canvas shoved behind a bunch of stationary and boxes that were being moved to make way for Christmas items. With the help of an employee I was able to shift the boxes and find my reward – a 12×14 piece of canvas board which was marked 3 bucks. The guy who helped me noted that one corner was dinged pretty hard and that since it was the last one in the store he felt it was only right to mark it down by 50% – who am I to argue with the guy?

I left the store with my treasure, my mood brighter than it had been for months and while I was still depressed, I had a plan, I had something to look forward to while my baby-girl was feasting with her dad and his family on national turkey day. With a few more days to wait I propped the stark white canvas board up where I could stare at it and I went about my business, getting all my required chores done so that I would have no interruptions once I set out on my voyage of artistic self-discovery.

The day finally dawned, I woke and passed through my morning routine swiftly, set up my pre-queued Netflix programming, pulled out my paints and painting accoutrements and then I picked up a pencil; good old # 2 Ticonderoga, which I now know are far better suited to scantron cards than to sketching, however it served its purpose fine that day.

Thankfully I also had a supply of erasers laid in, as lord knows, I needed them! Hours disappeared from one glance at the clock to another and before I knew it the image on the canvas looked more or less like what I had envisioned over the preceding days.

The piece is named “Soul Scream” and she is beautiful in all her imperfections. There is no question that her maker is a neophyte, the strokes are both hesitant and bold and the skin tones muddled, and yet, her purpose rings through. Right off the bat she touched someone, a dear friend and fellow sick-chick and soon Soul Scream will go to live with that friend, where she will be safe and appreciated. She is painted with nothing but oil, mostly because I didn’t know any better. No mixes or mediums, very little finesse… and yet each time I see her I am filled with pride. Okay, she looks a little like a refugee from an episode of The Simpsons, but that’s not necessarily a negative.

SOUL SCREAM

After that I painted more, using acrylic craft paints (which are different that artists acrylics, something else I learned after the fact) I created “Brain-Pain” an ode to the migraine and “The FMS FOG” in honor of Fibro-fog, that wonderfully miserable spaced out feeling that many with Fibromyalgia deal with; an odd symptom that makes us forget words and leave our remote controls in the freezer by accident. It just kept going from there; I was suddenly drawing all the time, suddenly seeing things from whole new perspectives. I was looking at my grandmother’s painting of a pheasant, the only piece of hers I have and for the first time I could see the layers – I could see the angle of the bird in flight and fill in the “hidden” pieces of bird – the tucked foot for instance.

BRAIN PAIN

THE F.M.S. FOG

Looking at the world around me I just kept drawing – pulling up image after image on Google so that I could see where a tree’s shadow would fall or how a guy holding a hammer might stand. My mother saw one of my pieces, Wine-Scape, and was remarkably excited. So much so that she showed my piece to a friend of hers, without telling her it was mine, just to see her reaction. The friend loved it so much she wants me to create a series to hang in her wine shop & art gallery for a month.  Thanks to moms support and bad-ass marketing and promotion skills I am also doing a donation piece for Habitat for Humanity, an organization that has long been close to my heart.

WINE-SCAPE

GREETING CARD

I learn something new each time I sit down to create, new ways to lay on paint, new ways to draw an item, new ways to see things, even better – I’ve discovered that I have so much more to discover.

Part of me looks back at that old art teacher with frustration – how could you tell a child beginning out in art that they will never be an artist, shame on you, what were you thinking? However, there is another part of me, the part that sees his intent was good and that recognizes that I really don’t do well with rules. I suppose it would be easy to say he ‘done me wrong’ but in hindsight, he may have given me a greater gift that day by allowing me to discover for myself that it’s okay to color outside the lines and that the real first rule of art is that there are no hard-fast rules, only guidelines, imagination and creation.

Thanks teach, it took more than 20 years, but I finally got the message. I will never be a classic artist, but then again, I don’t need to be.