I sometimes think I am living in the wrong time.
Given the opportunity and the support to create without interruption, I think I could make marvelous things.
There is arrogance in that sentence, perhaps. I don’t care.
I believe it.
I imagine a room with good light and a battered wooden table. Trays of pastels left open because there would be no reason to put them away. Paper stacked against a wall. Paintings leaning everywhere. Notebooks open to half-written sentences. My hands stained with pigment.
I would disappear into a tree trunk for six hours because I needed to understand what violet could do underneath green.
Then a sentence would arrive and I would abandon the tree exactly where it was, find my notebook and write until the words stopped coming.
I would probably become completely insufferable about being interrupted.
Of course, this imagined life has probably never existed quite the way I imagine it. Artists have always had bills. Women have always had responsibilities. People have needed patrons and jobs and food and somebody has always needed the damn laundry done.
Perhaps I am not living in the wrong time.
Perhaps I have simply reached the time in my own life when I understand that creating is not an accessory to it.
I work. I care for people and animals. I walk the dogs. I buy groceries. I come home tired. I carry grief and relationships and worry and all the ordinary demands of being alive.
And still I make things.
Sometimes I come home, pull out a piece of Pastelmat and put my hands into pigment. An hour later there is something in front of me that did not exist before.
At the same time, I am writing a book.
Lately I have wondered where all of this is coming from.
Maybe I know.
I have spent my entire life noticing.
The smell beneath an apple tree. The exact place where meadow becomes cut grass beneath bare feet. The sweep of branches caught by wind. Light on water. The posture of an animal. What someone’s face does when they are hurting. The impossible weight of an empty hand.
I have been learning to see for decades.
Technique can be learned. A pastel stick can teach me what it will do when I turn it sideways. I can discover what happens when I break it and use the sharp edge. I can learn when to layer and when to stop. I can learn that I don’t have to blend anything simply because someone else does.
But seeing?
That has taken a lifetime.
And now, perhaps, I am beginning to find out what my hand sounds like.
I love that idea. That somewhere between what my eyes notice and what appears on the paper, there is a language that belongs specifically to me. The pressure of a pastel against the surface. A broken line. A violent mark beside a quiet one. The things I exaggerate and the things I leave out entirely. I am beginning to recognize myself in the marks before I completely understand what they are saying.
Maybe that is why this feels so ravenous now.
I am not beginning from nothing.
It feels more like doors to rooms inside me have opened all at once, and I am discovering they have been full of things all along.
Trees. Words. Color. Memory. Grief. Bodies. Light. Water. Desire. Anger. Beauty.
Things I have carried for decades without knowing they were waiting for a form.
Last night I had henna done on my hand.
I chose that hand deliberately.
It is the hand I create with.
The hand that holds pastel sticks and pencils and brushes. The hand that moves across paper when I write. The hand that has touched bark because looking at a tree wasn’t enough. The hand that has held other hands and paws at the ends of lives. The hand that has spent decades doing necessary things.
For a little while, that hand will itself become a piece of art.
I love that.
And perhaps there is something especially right about decorating it now, when I am only beginning to understand what it has to say.
I cannot go backward and give the girl I was a studio and uninterrupted afternoons. I cannot give the younger woman years devoted entirely to making things. I wonder what she would have created if someone had given her that freedom.
But I have this woman.
I have her now.
And instead of mourning the imaginary life in which somebody gave her permission to become an artist, I can begin giving her more room in this one.
She is already here.
She is already making things.
Let me recognize myself.
Let me take up room.
Let my hands make what they know how to make.
Let me want what I want.
Let me remain open without abandoning myself.
Let me see what happens next.
I want to see what happens when I give her more territory.
