Painting an Artist
Wednesday, May 26th, 2010
“I am too much of a realist to become an artist.”
She said this to me as we sauntered across the park, leaves crunching beneath our feet.
“My brain is down-to-earth. Matter-of-fact. Artists aren’t like me. They flit about at poetry slams and galleries and other curious things without regard to the banal realities of life’s daily course.”
She lowered herself onto a bench and absentmindedly collected an errant leaf between her thumb and forefinger.
“Artists don’t walk like me. Certainly, they do not walk as the rest of us do. Rather they glide, pushed and pulled by whatever colourful whim is pulling hardest at any moment. Me? I walk.”
She rose and stomped her feet on the pavement, as if to prove they did indeed connect with the ground below.
“I do not live in a trendy artist’s enclave in Montmartre or Greenwich Village. I do not have a loft filled with ancient typewriters and busts of long-dead poets usurping table space from mundane things like cups and dishes. No, my home is a typical two-bed flat in Islington with particleboard furnishings from Ikea.”
Again she sat. She looked up and blew a stray curl out of her eyes, then sighed heavily.
“I am none of these things. I am not – I am not capricious enough to believe that if I just pursue my passions all will be right in the world. I have no sordid, tortured stories of abuse or heartbreak to use as justification for an absinthe addiction or as a muse on a moonless night.”
She clasped her hands together, as though seeking strength or maybe affirmation for her own words. Across the park children played hopscotch and an old man moved along the path at a snail’s pace.
“I am in limbo between two worlds, two identities. And yet I know what draws me. I know I am the sort who overanalyses interest rates and remembers to take my vitamins. And yet I yearn – no, rather burn to create. I am drawn to those who dress in black and design stage shows and stay up until the morning birds because they have an idea they simply must give birth to before it fades with the morning light. Those people are my kind, even if I am not theirs.”
That bothersome curl had found its way across her forehead once again, dangling in front of her brown eyes like a spring.
Again she blew it away and deftly picked up another leaf.
And she fumbled the leaf between her thumb and forefinger as only an artist can.