My Mother's Paint

As a child I used to sit for hours at my mother easel, watching in awe as she transformed a blank, white canvas into a work of art far beyond any I hoped to create myself. I longed for that visual medium that came like magic to my mother’s brush or pen or chalk. I cursed my clumsy fingers that lacked the ability to draw a straight line, much less anything more complicated than a stick figure in a field of thumb-print flowers. My admiration for my mother’s talent was boundless, and I still look on her work with the awe of a four year old on Christmas morning.

My mother always included me in “art time.” When we could afford to, we’d go to those ready-to-paint ceramics studios, and we’d paint plaques, or figurines together. And when Mom gave art lessons on barter or to friends, she would encourage me to join in. I would sometimes be able to draw with decent approximation whatever the day’s object might be...a flower on a window sill, or a table with different-shaped vases. I wasn’t half-bad at still-life once I really put my mind to it.

But I felt that I always went too far with my project, or not far enough. When we chose identical ceramic pigs to paint, Mom’s turned out lovely and delicate and life-like, with soft brown hair and sweet expressive eyes, and mine turned out…well…a bit more like a cartoon pig with far-too-vibrant peach hair and big never-found-in-nature-blue eyes. That pencil sketch of a flower that would really have looked quite lovely left as a sketch? I’d ruin it when I tried to color it in, smearing the pencil outline and muddying the reds and greens I tried to add. The drawing I made of children walking hand-in-hand on the beach remained forever half drawn, their incomplete faces never gazing into the soft waves I left out all together…

My mother would probably tell you a different story about my own abilities as an artist. She’d remind me that Wilbur, my favorite pig as a child, WAS a cartoon, so of course the ceramic pig I painted would emulate him. She’d say that the flower I ruined wasn’t ruined at all, that I was merely illustrating what I saw the way I saw it. Mom would point out that the children I began to draw, but didn’t finish, were in fact quite an accomplishment.

“It’s very interesting what you’re doing there,” Mom would say as I bent my head over the sketch pad she loaned me.

“How so?”

“Well,” said Mom, “you started with the feet first.”

“Is that wrong?” I asked, anxious now that I thought I had, once again, ruined what might have been my masterpiece.

“No, it’s not wrong, it’s just different. Hands and feet are the hardest to get right.”

It took me twenty years to really understand the things my mother tried to teach me through art. In my young mind, if I wasn’t getting the same outcome at the easel that my mother did, I was a failure. If the colors in my flower weren’t as crisp as Mom’s, then they were awful. If I couldn’t draw faces the way she did, or even finish a drawing, I had no talent. I never thought about the fact that my mother had been drawing and painting and honing her craft her entire life, or that I’d always chosen choir and drama over art class. It never entered my mind that perhaps one of the reasons I couldn’t create what my mother could wasn’t because I had no ability, but rather because I had not 1/100th of the passion my mother did for drawing and painting.

I didn’t grasp then that the reason my mother was so amazing with visual mediums, and so very gifted at crafting people, was because she loved it, and she nearly always drew what she loved. She wasn’t just being nice when she commented on how remarkable it was that I drew the feet and hands of those children first, she meant it. For her, feet and hands were truly exasperating because they weren’t what she was interested in. Feet and hands weren’t what she saw. Character was my mothers delight as an artist. The sadness in the eyes of a neglected wife, the beaming smile of a little girl with her favorite toy, the sagging jowls of an elderly man, the weathered creases in a farmer’s brow…if my mother was extraordinary at capturing someone on canvas, it’s because she painted what fascinated her, and she captured what she saw, the way she saw it.

I still wonder at my mother’s gift, and her ability to see through a blank white square to the portrait that’s waiting inside. And I hope that I can create characters on stage half as true to life as those my mother creates on canvas.

As I was saying...

Commandment #2: Listen More, Talk Less

I’m a loquacious gal. If you haven’t figured out by reading my previous posts let me clue you in - I talk. A lot. I’m also an actor, so naturally I can (and often times do) talk, ad nauseam, about my feelings, and my art, and my current project, and my past projects, and my other feelings and my, and my, and my… I have a tendency, as much as I hate to admit it, to be quite a selfish conversationalist. I recognize this in myself – I recognize this as a weakness – a big one. And I want to change it.

I want to think less of myself and more of others, and I think that starts with listening. When someone speaks to me, I want to be engaged. Within the breaths between words, I want the possibility of learning from others to open up - not my mouth. And when my mouth does open, I want the words I speak to be informed by the information just provided, and not by thoughts waiting impatiently to burst from between my lips the minute the other person stops talking. Listen and react is the cornerstone of acting, and I want to do it better. Really listening to a friend when they need you is the heart of friendship, and I want to be a better friend. Listening, not just to the voice or the words but to every thing not being said in the between, is absolutely essential to being a good partner, and wife and mother … and oh how I want to be a good partner, and wife, and (someday) mother.

So in the next few weeks and months, when you hear less of my voice, understand it’s because I’m making the effort to hear more in yours.