Specializing and Girlhood Dreams

My first love was painting and even now when I am tired thinking in words can feel like a barrier — but some charcoal, brush, or ink feel like extensions of my body. All intuition. Pure expression. 

But a blank page or canvas daunts me now, like words did back then. 

What is this reversal? 

The dream was to be a painter, have a studio in new york where my giant canvases laid around like sleepy tenants in a junky flat. I’d wear all black but paint in all color and the walls would grow thick with flecks of flying pigments. Friends would share shows with me in tiny storefronts and the super rich would bid each other silly fighting for my depictions of familial pain or truth and beauty. I’d paint fast like Lautrec but delicate like Whistler. I’d paint portraits of my friends, immortalizing them as no mere randos in the rush of time, but gorgeous contenders for godhood. Like how we know Dorian Gray’s portrait must have looked. Perhaps, too, my paintings would be haunted and magical – gateways not just into the viewer’soul, but actual fantasy worlds like Mickey through the looking glass. Mirror and photographs would pale and wilt when faced with one of my human renditions. 

Very young, my grandparents indulged this at every christmas and birthday, and my aunts had reams of paper for me to fill with epic landscapes of the old west with majestic herds of pintos and broncos, or else, flighty  eyries of gorgons, clouds, and pegasi (pegasuses?). No child can grasp how poor or rich their parents are, but it’s clear now that mine were either quite poor, or just very anti-art. When I told them of my career path as a painter, my mother said nothing and my father said, “Ok, but then you have to be the best. There are thousands of painters, but only the very best, maybe 5 or 10, can make a living doing it. 

Now, I don’t know why, but this deterred me. How could I be the best. What did “best” even mean? I knew I was not even the best in my second grade class because John Devine’s landscape of a city beat my landscape of a city in our 2nd grade art show. 

Ergo, I cast about for some other career path, and I know I’m rambling here, and that I must have a point, and I will find it soon. 

Thoughts like astronaut, architect, and doctor all fell to the spectre of Math. I had a shit 4th grade teacher who brute forced the ability to add and multiply right out of my soul. Similarly, Archeologist or Paleontologist fell to the wayside because of the need to be good at chemistry, which is really just dressed up math. 

Eventually, I discovered that there are jobs like Politician and Lawyer that have to do with language, and I was pretty good at language. But no lawyer or politician I’d ever seen or heard of seemed to live the romantic loft life of my dreams. 

I don’t know how I found poetry, but i wrote a poem about a boy once, and absent mindedly left it on the computer desk (this was the 90s so we had one prized computer in the living room that we took turns using). My dad returned it to me later saying, “this is quite good” before leaving again. It was the most compliment I’d gotten out of a parent, and being a good little people pleaser, I styled myself a poet from there on out. I got notebooks and filled them with observations and worships of cute boys and laments of not being good at math or popular. 

There is no best poet. There is no best painter. These are myths. 

What is the scale that people insist on – Gold, Silver, Bronze. Blue ribbons. It’s rubbish. Watch the olympics long enough and you’ll notice that athletes have good and bad days – mood swings or family strife – will throw off the perceived best at skiing or javelin hurling. Even more, genetics affects their performance way more than any amount of skill or practice. Say they practice the same amount, take the same vitamins, and have the same trainers – hulks are always going to win more swimming competitions than petit folks. 

I think I’m finding my point. 

Painters and poets fall to less genetic whims and more to zeitgeist whims. Picasso’s blue period masterworks would never have found an audience, let alone be sold, if he’d tried those techniques a hundred years earlier. 

Emily Dickenson didn’t publish anything in her lifetime because of sexism and oppression and fear, but in a society that wipes away alot of that grime, her poems shine. 

I have no idea if the world will like my poetry, if it will ever sell in my lifetime or if it’ll be discovered on some distant shore in some post-apocalyptic future when humans are stories in books written by owls.  But it is the medium I have chosen, It is the artistic love of my life. I am a specialist regardless of how the world perceives me. 

And I have piles of scribbly books that stack and lean like sleepy tenants in a junky flat.

Poem in photo from the collection Pig by Sam Sax.