Live deliberately

And muck around with art

I signed up for an art class because I wanted to live deliberately.

Read that in your best Neil Perry from Dead Poet’s Society voice. (Pretend we’re standing in a cave as the water drips down onto our boarding school heads.)

I signed up for an art class because I wanted to live deliberately, live deep and suck all the marrow out of life and also because I felt a scream scratching around in my throat at the idea of having to do another mindless hamster wheel day of pedantic tasks.

Hell yes, I’m in that phase of life where the busyness dominates almost everything else. To which I raise a jaunty middle finger because if diabetes has taught me any stupid thing, it’s not take anything for granted. Problem is, I’m a human so I am taking things for granted. It’s part of how human brains are wired, not thinking about how fleeting life is but instead getting all bent out of shape because we’re already out of grapes.

I signed up for an art class because I wanted to live deliberately, to live deep and suck all the marrow out of life. To put to rout all that was not life, only I was finding myself routing all over the damn place and I desperately needed to learn something new, something to make my brain cobwebs shake loose and cower in the corners of my synapses in fear that I would dust-bust them.

The art class is weekly, a private lesson with a very skilled multimedia artist whose gentle demeanor and equally gentle Rhode Island accent takes the intimidation factor of learning a new skill down several notches.

“I’ve never held an oil pastel before,” I admitted. My bag filled with responsibilities thudded to the floor. I knew there were library books that needed to be returned and a prescription that needed to be dropped off at the pharmacy and a bunch of diabetes snackies taking up space in that bag. But they were sharing space with a fresh box of oil pastels, so the moment felt potent.

“It’s okay,” she replied, handing me a piece of textured paper. “You wanted to draw lemons, right? Only lemons with ... eyebrows?”

I signed up for art classes because I wanted to live deliberately, to live weird and stick all the eyebrows on my life. To not be bored or go through the motions only to discover when I had come to die that I had not truly followed through and put eyebrows on everything.

I leaned in.

“Yes. That’s exactly it. I want every piece to look like Eugene Levy.”

I am learning. The curve, she be steep. I sat down to draw an apple only when I gave it some shading and texture, it was more a plucked-bald Elmo. I drew a lemon with a strangely snouty front and closely resembled a hedgehog with an overbite. Today, the teacher draped a bolt of beige fabric on the table and told me to draw the values (range of lights and darks) and I created something that looked like evil teeth in a macabre skull only it was supposed to be BEIGE FABRIC so maybe that didn’t come out entirely right.

NOTHING came out entirely right.

It’s all awful! And I love it.

The class gives me a strange tightness in my throat and around my chest, so much so that I wondered briefly if I was allergic to oil pastels. I am not; it was simply the thrill. It was also fear, like being at the release point of a rollercoaster, cresting over that first drop.

I didn’t feel the pressure to be good at something.

Instead, I just fucking DID the thing.

I love the way the pastels feel. They’re creamy and thick and when I drag them across the paper to make my repugnant pears, the power is intoxicating. (Maybe I am allergic.) They smudge together and blend to create shadows and valleys and if I’m not careful, I end up with oil pastels all over my face and my glasses. I’m not creating anything you’d recognize. I’m abstracting the shit out of every attempt. It feels raw and goofy and no one is watching or judging or caring. It’s like dancing with the lights off. It’s like singing when the car windows are sealed tight. It’s like writing in a journal.

Writing has been stressful lately. I’m more than halfway through drafting my second manuscript and some days it feels like that top of the rollercoaster feeling, all potential and flow and that joyous clench in my stomach. Other days, writing feels like I threw up on the roller and the puke has physics’d itself back into my face. Trying to draft successfully is catalyzing tremendous self-doubt, but I’m still plugging away. (I’d be sunk without my writing cohort. They keep me accountable and also from losing my mind.)

The art class is different. The attempt, the medium, the outcome — all new to me. It’s impossible to fail because the goal is to have fun.

I want to live deliberately. I want to keep learning. And I have a small stash of eyebrows that I cut from index cards at the ready in my bag.

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