consider the artist

I started drawing when I was a little girl.

I would wear one of my grandmother’s T-shirts as a smock as I sat on a little stool at a little Fisher-Price easel with a little palette of watercolors. In the 4th grade, I gave my first crush a pencil drawing. His name was Ryan. The drawing was of a rattlesnake. I had studied a photo of a snake in a National Geographic magazine and painstakingly replicated the scales, row after row.

In high school I took all the art classes, all the advanced placement art classes, and then transferred schools when I ran out of art classes to take. I got in trouble for drawing in my regular classes. I submitted my portfolio and was accepted to SVA, Parsons, and Pratt Institute. I had a nervous breakdown and didn’t go to college straight away.

Those schools were expensive; eventually I went to a state school instead. I waited tables, and left a trail of drawings in my wake, on order slips, on specials boards, on receipts. In my free time, I took classes in new mediums, like ceramics. I taught myself. I painted friends, family, strangers. I moderated an online Reddit forum focused on portraits. I have made a lot of work, a lot of times for free, because that initial experience of being barred from access to art school due to a financial barrier left a bad taste in my mouth. It also created a credibility barrier, as I had no degree. So how do I make a living doing it?

How can I not, when living is creating art, for me? Art is my life is my art. I still struggle to define myself as an artist because I exist on the fringes. I keep to myself. I don’t know what a “real” artist looks like. I just know myself.

The act of painting someone’s portrait is very intimate. It can be painful for me, that is why it is called pain-ting. Do you ever realize how infrequently you truly look at other people? When you look someone fully in the face for too long, that is called staring, and it makes people uncomfortable. They shift in their seats, they squirm, they often tell you to stop. So, most of us do not look at other people’s faces for long, uninterrupted periods.

Go try it with a loved one. What is it like?

When I paint someone’s portrait, I am staring at their face for hours. Hours. And because I am looking at them, I am thinking about them. Who they are. What I know of them. How I feel about them. Painting someone’s portrait holds me hostage to my feelings about that person for the duration…

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