I grew up in the dry foothills of Santa Fe, New Mexico under the tent of a big blue sky. I still remember as a young child happening upon some blooming pastel drawings of colors fading into each other, simple works that played with red to orange to yellow to green to blue to purple and so on. They were in a forgotten box that a long ago house guest had left. I wished I had made them and I may have even lied and said that I was the creator. They were so beautiful to me. Another house guest, or the same, lived on a trailer on our land for a time. She let us (my siblings and I) draw in chalk on the trailer. I thought it was mighty generous of her to host our scribbles. She said, ‘the rain will wash it all away,’ but I thought she was taking a pretty big risk. Seeing as it didn’t rain much, she might get stuck with something for quite awhile. None the less it provided me with an opportunity to draw without the pressure of preciousness.
It wasn’t until high school that I was introduced to the Blues. Growing up my parents weren’t particularly musical. I mostly remember Paul Simon and when I got to middle school and the question would always come, weighted with judgement, ‘What type of music do you listen to?’ I would shrink inside and never respond truthfully. I didn’t know what type of music I liked. I didn’t even know what the types were. My more musically inclined older sister listened to They Might Be Giants, The Mighty Mighty Bosstones, and the song ‘The Girl From Ipanima.’ I didn’t have much to go on. I was more comfortable in quiet corners with books. Despite having four siblings, there was still plenty of quietude. While my mother cleaned out the study (she would always get distracted when she cleaned,) I stared at a postcard of Van Gogh’s Sunflowers taped to the filing cabinet and thought how dark and dreary they looked, how ugly. They seemed to reflect my mood. How could a famous artist have done them and how could my mother think they were beautiful? Those yellow flowers, sometimes it felt like yellow flowers were the only color flower that dry land produced. But years later I would walk the dry land with my French aunt-in-law, pointing out the wildflowers. She said it was like an Easter egg hunt, finding the flowers. I explained to her I wasn’t good with the yellow flower names because they were so plentiful. She said, ‘See I love them, they reminded me of the sun.’
I remember nagging my mother when she was probably trying to take a nap, ‘What should I draw?’ I would decry, ‘I don’t know what to draw!’ Then I would systematically reject all her suggestions. Later I would find myself cleaning and distracted and my son asking me, ‘What should I draw?’ But that would be later.
In first grade we had a salad dressing party. We all brought a different salad dressing to adorn the plentiful salad offerings provided. It was also a day to invite guests into the classroom. I brought in my grandparents and their presence was warm and friendly and new in the classroom setting. I also brought in my mother’s homemade salad dressing. It was the kind of dressing where the oil and vinegar separates, the kind with fresh garlic, salt and pepper, the delicious kind. It looked strange to the other kids. I was sometimes ashamed of my brown bag lunch but I knew that dressing was good. I gathered my courage, whisked it up with a spoon and poured myself a generous amount.’You have to stir it first,’ I told a kid, passing on the secret. Near the end of the class some of the other kids discovered the delicious sour dressing, a confident girl proclaiming, ‘I wish I’d known about it at the beginning!’ The teacher commented that it was the only homemade dressing. We were to show our guests the books we had written and bound. I brought out book after book of hand written and illustrated princess stories until my grandparents raised their eyebrows at each other as I continued to procure more and more homemade books from my desk.
Much happened between first grade and now but to recount it becomes flat and line like: the discovery and love of the printing press (some of the old freedom rediscovered) in high school, flowers and people in college. Then a child. After my child was born I continued to paint flowers but moved onto working with watercolors because of the toxicity of oil, the proximity of my son and the lack of time afforded with a newborn. I could say that what keeps me painting is the pleasurable texture of paper, the challenge to create loose yet accurate line and the curiosity with which I view a finished piece but to know why I do art I tend to spiral backwards. I was a child and my aunt and uncle had just gotten married. It was a storybook wedding that I got to partake in. My aunt had a long white silken train and I, I felt I was just as beautifully adorned in a white dress and shoes and I got to be part of the wedding. A big part. I carried the train and felt second only to the bride herself and afterwards I got to run free with my older brother and cousins among the many stories of the hotel dropping spitballs down on the guests below. It was a titillating experience and afterwards I drew it all out on the wall in our dining room. I was heartbroken when my parents make me erase it and wash it off. ‘You can draw it on paper,’ they said and I cried, ‘It won’t be the same!’ with tears on my flushed face and a wash cloth in my hand.
I was young again and my mom picked me up from a friend’s house. The mother there had laid out a big sheet of paper and we were allowed to finger paint. It absorbed me, the big sheet of paper and the freedom to use paint, any color and any amount, as I wished. The mom reassured me, ‘It’s not expensive.’ I lost myself in the same way that I had lost track of time once playing with a three dimensional paper doll house. With the doll house, my mother had awoken me out of my spell with her hand rubbing my back, telling me it was dinner time, as if gently shaking me from a dream, another world. I didn’t know how the hours had passed, the paper people, the house, the story had been real and it left me wanting, always wanting, to go back to that state. The state that Colter and Wheal describe as “flow state” characterized by selflessness, timelessness, effortlessness, richness, and improved problem solving.* My friend at the time, a boy, also had a billion beautiful glass marbles unlike any I owned. I took two. Somehow my mother found them and that same day we drove back to the house to return them. The friend’s mother said, ‘they are a gift, really he has so many he won’t even notice they are gone.’ And in a low whisper to my mom she added, ‘He has too many toys anyways!’ I could have told my mom that the kid was too distracted by his plastic toys to even know, let alone care about, the treasures he had. I wasn’t allowed to keep them and the day was tainted with shame. I never wanted to go back there again.
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*Stealing Fire: How Silicon Valley, the Navy SEALS, and Maverick Scientists Are Revolutionizing the Way we Live and Work. Stephen Kotler & Jamie Wheal. Harper Collins New York, NY, 2017.