LOST HISTORY

It’s happening. For the first time in almost twenty years, I am drawing again. It started yesterday when it occurred to me that the Figure Skating Club I had just joined had no logo to herald its lofty presence. So, why not see if I could come up with something grand to represent it? My voice has begun to flow out of me through pencil on paper. Oh, beloved pencil, it has been too, too long since we last touched. I remember now how I once loved the Steadtler 2B; it had the warmest, smoothest feel, effortlessly painting lines on thick white paper. Now a cheap number 2 pencil feels just as wonderful, because I am guiding it, and it does my bidding…

Eighteen years ago, I went to college full of hope and ideas, and obsessed with art. I had been a budding watercolorist and oil painter, ripe with the anticipation of my arrival on the New York art scene, and full of the kind of know-it-all confidence that only a teenager can have. However, after one year of college art courses filled with depressingly disingenuous critique sessions, I found myself disillusioned and listless. This artist’s life was not at all what I had hoped for, and this art world was not interested in what my art had to say. If you let art speak for itself, no one wanted to hear.

Then I met a professor who changed the course of my life. At the time, he seemed to provide the answer to my disillusionment with the art world- leave it and become an electrical engineer. He crushed my enjoyment of drawing one day when he saw me sketching at the dining room table, walked up behind me, slapped my back so that my pencil went flying and the wind was knocked out of me. “Why aren’t you mowing the lawn?!” he bellowed, then laughed at my astonished expression. I was so shocked, I froze. That was the last time I had ever drawn with any desire to do so- each time since then it was in spite of my sluggish reluctance, because after all, the Professor told me I am “going to die one day, so why bother with your art?”