Art Doesn't Just Happen

“How’s your art going, Jack?” my mother asked. “Paint me any masterpieces yet?”

I sighed deeply, involuntarily, and I tried not to let her hear me on the phone. I didn’t want to make a big deal out of it, not with her anyway, but this was what I had been afraid of. “It’s going all right,” I said. “No masterpieces yet, though.”

“Oh, you’re too hard on yourself,” she said, unreasonably, despicably cheerful. “They always say you’re your own toughest critic.”

“Yeah, well,” I said. I glanced in the direction of my art supplies. My easel lay in pieces against the wall, not even fully assembled yet, a bag of art supplies next to it, still in their wrappers. “They haven’t seen my work.”

In the years that I was locked up, a fantasy had played on an endless loop in my head: I would get out, I would get myself set up with a nice little studio and life, and I would create great art. My art would show the nuanced agony of a just soul in an unjust world. A terrible recrimination of society would be there in the paintings, not visible on the surface but seething underneath in a way that would leave the observer shaken and breathless. How could I fail to paint this, when this was my life, my soul? I would be notorious. There would be acclaim.

This fantasy had carried me through many dark and lonely nights when my only artistic media were broken bits of crayons and my only canvas the back of a crumpled psychiatric report retrieved from a garbage can. Then I had watched with awe and fascination as that fantasy had slowly coalesced from my mind into the real world. Little by slowly, it came to pass. My open-ended incarceration turned into a finite stay. A release date appeared on the horizon and marched closer.

And yet, through it all, a dark specter sat with me in my mind, watching me build my dreams and all the time wearing a cynical smirk. He asked simple questions: What if you really aren’t very good? Aren’t you forgetting that nobody really cares? Why should anyone take you seriously? What have you ever done? What if you aren’t as good as you think you are? What if everyone who ever tried to talk you out of chasing your crazy art dream was right, and you were wrong all along? What if you’re just not that good?

On the other side of the release date, free at last, I found a studio apartment, and I got a job that seemed destined for me. With my new freedom and employment, my artistic supplies had blossomed into a full complement of tools, a bouquet of media.

Here, however, in the life I had torn from my own dreams, I found myself paralyzed. Many times I tried to start, but the minutes of sketching turned to tortured hours of work and re-work, and each time I abandoned the piece in frustration, never coming near the visions in my head.

I didn’t dare to tell my mother any of this. How could I tell anyone? How could I ever admit that, after everything I had gambled and lost, that maybe my little demon was right? Maybe I wasn’t any good. Maybe I never had been.

“I’ve just a little unfamiliar with the acrylic paints,” I said, with a guilty glance at the unopened package. “It never turns out as good as it seemed in my head.”

“Maybe you could take a class at the community college,” she suggested. “You wanted to do that before.”

“I was planning on a college fund back then,” I said. “I can’t really afford classes now.”

She was silent on the phone for a moment, and I immediately regretted my choice of excuse. I could tell that she was trying to think of how she could give me money for classes.

I couldn’t allow that. “Besides,” I said, “I’m not sure anymore that the classes are a good idea, anyway.”

“Really?”

“Yeah. I’m afraid those classes would ruin originality, make make everybody draw and paint the same.”

She was quiet again. Money must be tighter than I knew. This made me feel guilty and sad.

“Anyway,” I said, “if you want to draw and paint, you don’t have to have classes.” I glanced at my easel and bag of supplies again. “You just have to do it.”

“If that’s what you think, Jack, I trust your judgment,” she said. “You’re the one with the artistic talent, not me.”

Three hours later I stood in the door watching the sun going down. After hanging up with my mother, I had leaned the easel against the wall, positioned a new white canvas, and gone to work with an old charcoal pencil and a fierce new determination to get something acceptable done this time. Now I felt almost breathless and thoroughly defeated. If my goal had been to destroy a perfectly good canvas, my work would have been a success.

Maybe I just wasn’t very good.

I leaned against the doorframe and watched the brilliant Arizona sunset. The fading rays of sunlight seemed to course through my body and warm my soul, and I found myself turning unexpectedly optimistic. Why should I expect instant success? I was in an unfamiliar setting, with new tools. Was it so unnatural to find this a challenge, to need some time to fit into the new environment? No. Was I being too hard on myself? Quite possibly.

If that was the case, what I needed to do most was simply to relax. With practice, the results would come.

There was another possibility, too. Maybe the drama and pain of my life was too far in the past, and maybe I was too far removed from it now to have it shine through in my work. Maybe I needed some new inspiration. I had been confined to a small space for several years, and since being released I had been working and living in another small space. Maybe I needed to get out and see the world, have an adventure.

Could I really find adventure, though, in the quiet heart of the city?

Maybe.