Perhaps this can be attributed to my early years in Saturday morning art class. We'd spend each month studying a different genra of art, from still life to wire sculptures, from oil pastels to pottery. All of this was run out of a kind woman's little house by a park where the leaves changed dramatically every fall. I still distinctly remember making the turn onto her street and being just blasted by the sheer color of the trees. We don't get very much of that in Southern California.
I started these lessons when I was very small - I think it was around the same time that I started playing piano. I told myself that I'd grow up to be an author who illustrated her own books. How grand would that be? So I sketched away, HB, 2B, 6B, stringy erasers, abstract art, my first watercolor, a bloated mess of purples and browns. I was so proud of it, though. Every completed work on a canvas that was almost as tall as I was, every masterpiece painted and hot-glued together.
All of it was my own work, and all of it was tangible. With writing, one has to strain to see, to feel the words and the shape they were meant to take. It was a different form of art, one I loved just the same, but one that, at times, took far too much effort.
I once crafted a snail from clay. I squished the body flat with my thumbs and coiled a separate piece of clay for the shell, just like I'd watched my grandmother make noodles. I had some spare time, so I crafted a little duck and a little snowman and stuck it onto the snail's back. After it was fired but before the glaze was added, I painted my snail a pale sort of pink with a green shell.
It came back to me the next Saturday glossy and smooth, never mind the lumps in the clay. It was something I'd made. Something beautiful.
When I grew older, my parents set aside my love for art, wrapped it up tight in a carboard box, and stuck it on a shelf in the garage alongside my love for life. Art was a child's fancy, they said. I would never make a living from fooling around with paint and clay. I remember the day my mother came to pick me up from my last art lesson. I cried.
And so it was that I learned to lose myself in words. Thankfully, my lessons in letters and stories and books continued because those, at least, could be considered useful to my future well-being. It wasn't until many years later that music became another panacea for my increasing distrust of the world. Now these two are my constants.
I've had my flings, though. First it was crocheting. I crocheted stable blankets for my plastic horses, all in the same pale blue. Then I dabbled in acrylics for a bit, forever painting the same landscape but never quite recreating it. Then I sewed. That didn't last too long, but at least now I can sew buttons and create buttonholes without my mother's worrisome assistance. Then I dabbled in jewelry. Tiger Tail wire, crimps, tiny round-nose pliers and chain-nose pliers, seed beads galore. It was something grand to see it all completed. It always was.
Maybe I have too much nervous energy. Or maybe I've just been reading too much Freud.
Either way, I still write. By hand. Which recently nearly drove my latest English teacher to tears. There's something that just disappears when I stare at a flickering screen and tap tap tap away. Everything becomes so impersonal. There's no character to the shape of the words, just a mass of uniformity that's more than just a little frightening. I guess I'm just saying that there's less art to typing than there is to writing, though the words may be the same. What are words but art?
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