First, see the need. Not as in “the need to create.” But as in “You need to hang something on that wall, but that wall gets direct sunlight, so either the wall stays empty or you keep the shades drawn all morning.” Or, option three: Paint a picture of your own and then it won’t matter if the sun fades it.
Go to the sale at Michael’s. Stretched cotton-canvasses are 50% off. You find the right aisle. The biggest one—the one you need—is three by four feet. Those numbers sound small. Before you, wrapped up, sitting on the shelf, daring you to buy it and actually put paint onto it, that canvass is massive.
Your mother is an artist. When you cast your memory back to your earliest years and let the sinker float to the bottom of your faintest recall, this is what you know about your mother. She was always making something. There was a book on her shelf titled The Courage to Create. You never read it, not even the dust jacket description. For all you know, it was about procreation. But that phrase. . . You’ve always held that with you. That it takes courage to create something.
Take a deep breath. Take that canvass off the shelf and stand it next to your cart.
Next aisle: paint. The oils are first, don’t even consider them. You have no idea what to do with oil paint, you would have to worry about it staining your floor because you plan to do your painting right there in your open family room where the sunlight that started this project is because you've always heard that artists "need good light."
Acrylics are down a few feet. Grade 3, for professionals. Grade 2, for hobbyists. Ah, Grade 1, for students, that’s all you need. You would pay for the best if you were planning to paint something stunning and worthy that your children would one day fight over. But that kind of investment—that kind of hope—is too much pressure.
Now for the colors. You arrive in this aisle with a plan. You will paint layers of color and then use a silver marker to write words over them because this lines up with your lifelong conviction that everything is better with words.
The art you already have in your home, like the government issued OWI posters that say “Keep Him Flying!” or “Strong in the strength of the Lord we who fight in the people’s cause will never stop until that cause is won” feature words. And the others are so realistic, they may as well come with a typed explanation of the artist’s point. Knowing that you are going to write something on top of what you paint is the only thing that gives you the courage to be standing here. And, you realize, that’s kind of cheating.
The colors. . . You like that periwinkle blue. And white, of course. And you’ll need black, that much you remember from your junior high art teacher. You look over and see an older lady examining the oils, sighing in the same way you have been.
“They are more expensive than they used to be,” she says with a German accent. You talk with her. She used to paint, and is now getting back to it at the age of 82. You are not an artist, you explain to her. You just want to make a painting. She wants to know what you’re planning, she “oohs” and “ahhs” over your idea and makes you feel like you’re a little bit brilliant and that this might actually work out OK.
You don’t quite believe her. You say, “This canvass intimidates me.”
“Yes,” she nods. “I don’t know that I can take it up again, either.” You ask about this, learn that she was a hobbyist before, but she says this with a wry smile and you think she tried a show here and there.
“It takes courage to create,” you say. She grabs your forearm and nods vigorously, like it was the phrase she had been looking for.
What are the words you plan to write, she wants to know. You think of them. You get choked up. You can’t say them out loud right now. So you sum up, instead, “A scripture that meant so much to me in the past year,” she nods and smiles. This doesn’t weird her out. You explain about the breast cancer, that there were some verses from God’s word that helped you out of recovery and into the rest of your life.
This woman lost her sister to breast cancer. She tells you that you are too young to have had it. She dares to ask “Which one?” and looks at you, which makes you smile because only an old woman from the old world would be so bold.
You talk with her for a while longer and she remarks again that she might not paint after all. So you tell her that, as far as creative outlets go, you are actually a writer. Who’s never published anything. Because you’ve never submitted anything, ever, to be published. “But I finally did,” you tell her. “And it’s OK if they say ‘no’ because the important part was actually making the submission.”
She grips your arm again, nodding, again. “Good luck to us” she says.
After she leaves with her oils, you pick out a yellow because you know enough to mix your own secondary colors. And you take a silver as well. Because you are dying to know what silver paint mixed in would do to an ordinary color.
Find yourself on a Monday afternoon in a well-lit family room. The kids from next door are inside playing with your kids because the school districts gave them a snow day. The laundry is folded. Dishes done. You don’t know how long this will take, but it’s a good idea to start now because chunks of open time when the room is bright are not common.
You know there is a value pack of 25 brushes you bought for the children several months ago. Get those out. Their palettes are too small, though. Built for small paintings. You have 12 square feet to cover. A lot of paints to mix. The easel is downstairs and right next to it is a box of antiques your husband is staging up to bring to the auction house. In that box, find several metal trays that the Army mess hall used for meal time. They are big. Full of sections. Perfect. Will he mind that you are using his antique mess hall trays for paint? Probably not. When it comes to allowing a woman a room of her own, your husband is Virginia's dream come true.
You have bowls of water ready. Soft cloths ready. You are even wearing slippers to keep your feet warm as you stand on the cold tile. Unwrap the 8 by 10 inch practice canvass you bought. Notice that the label says it is "treated." Plastic off, you whiff a chemical you've never smelled before. Huh. Be glad they treated it for you because you certainly didn't know it needed treatment to begin with.
Well. It’s time. Squeeze paint. Mix it. Put it on the canvass. Get an idea of what colors belong there. See what silver does—ah, what silver does! Makes the color rich, makes it almost glow. Before the practice canvass is even done, you love this. You love putting paint onto stretched cotton.
Tear off the wrapper of the big canvass, the Real Deal, the Big Guy, The One. Paint it. Paint and mix colors and paint and paint and mix and paint with big sweeping motions and small dib-dabs and watch the colors do their own thing that you couldn’t have made them do if you tried but they just happened to be there and not here and even the canvass itself kind of does something, it’s so rich in texture. You can’t believe it. As you are painting and watching what it is doing and painting and hardly thinking of anything and
You hear, “What are you doing?”
It’s the neighbor girl. Smile. Keep painting. Say, “I’m pretty sure you can figure out what I’m doing.”
“Painting?”
Yeah.
Now all four children are by you. The neighbor girl wants to know why you’re painting. Your son wants to know what you’re painting. The neighbor boy wants to know if it’s the sky. Your daughter wants to know if you’re going to sell it.
Give answers: Because you want to paint. You can’t say. It could be. No, you’re going to hang it.
The boys go back to Legos. The girls ask if they can watch. Your mom always let you watch. It seems not to have harmed either of you. So you agree.
Your daughter and her friend narrate what you are doing. Every little thing—she’s using the little brush to mix, she’s cleaning that brush, she’s putting on the next color. Then they start offering suggestions and opinions. Tell them, “You can watch, but you can’t say anything.”
“Can we whisper?” your daughter asks.
Tell them, “You can whisper, but not to me.”
Keep going. Keep going until, about 40 minutes after you got the brushes out of your kids’ art supplies cabinet, you finish.
The boys come in. Your son declares that it is a beach. The neighbor boy, too. They are four and they need—very badly—for it to be something. Your daughter tries to make sense of it, too. Say, “A pretty good sign that a piece is abstract art is when the artist is not sure which end is up.”
The neighbor girl nods with approval at this. She has heard of abstract art before.
Clean up. Look at your painting. Consider it. There’s so much to take in, which is ridiculous, because it’s just layers of color. But you can’t help but gaze at it. Maybe that’s because it’s yours. Just as you are convinced that your children are the most gorgeous of all children on the planet.
Your silver markers wait for you. In betrayal of lifelong conviction, decide not to use them. Psalm 1, the one about you—
. . . Her delight is in the Word of the Lord, and on His law she meditates day and night
She will be as a tree planted by streams of living water
Whose leaf does not whither
Which yields its fruit in season
Whatever she does prospers.
Well. No need to write it on that canvass. This is your life now.
Is the painting any good? You have no way of gauging. You suspect, with near certainty, that it is not “good.” But the blessing in not knowing enough to know means that you can enjoy it. You don’t need to submit it to anyone, because you don’t want to be a painter. You just wanted a painting. So you made one.
