Art + Me
“The flow of energy through a system acts to organize that system”
— The Last Whole Earth Catalogue
I am taking an art lesson. The first one, I think, in my whole life. Because we are in the middle of a pandemic, the lesson is via FaceTime and my teacher has his iPad pointed at his easel and I am standing watching him on my laptop.
I am taking an art lesson from Larry Stephens, a man I have known for nearly 30 years, since our toddler daughters were in day care together. For years Larry and his wife were our emergency back-up number at school and camp for our daughter and we were for his. I know him as an artist, too. I actually went into labor with my son 22 years ago at his MFA graduation show. But this is not casual chat at a group show. Now I am listening to all he has learned as an artist, an art teacher, something he has done as long as I have been a writer and writing teacher.
At first, we don’t draw. He asks me what was the most important book in my life. This is a bad question for a writer: we think way too much about books. Novel? Book of poems? Something that changed your life, he adds. I am torn between the true but literary (Canterbury Tales — changed Undergrad-Me’s life) and the 50-year old boxed set of Lord of the Rings I can see out of the corner of my eye on my bookshelf (changed 10-Year-Old-Me’s life) and then my mind starts clicking, seeing connections between those two works which could and should be drawn. Clearly, this is a very distracting question for someone who has spent 33 years as a professor in an English department.
My teacher draws me back to the moment. My book, he says, was The Last Whole Earth Catalogue. He tells me he grew up on a farm. His older brother returned from traveling with the book and the minute my teacher opened it, his life was changed. He holds up a copy. We are the same age. I remember the book, too. He has it opened to a hauntingly lovely photo of the earthrise as seen from the moon, the earth white against the endless black of space. The words The flow of energy through a system acts to organize that system glow in white italics on the black of the page.
To me, this seems like a poetry prompt. Something you could use as a first line of a poem, as a way into the real work your poem would end up doing. I imagined line breaks, maybe enjambed for some tension:
The flow of
energy through a
system acts to
organize
that system
Later, I will discover that the quotation is from Energy Flow in Biology by Harold Morowitz, since there is no attribution on the page.
Now, my teacher picks up the wooden charcoal holder and firmly prints his name in block letters on the paper pinned to his easel. It is surprisingly noisy. I pay attention. As he does this, he talks about how natural this motion is, using our hand and fingers to write, to control the line. He asks me to write my name on the piece of paper I have pinned on my drawing board. Honestly, for me, writing like this does not feel as natural as it once did. These days, I write nearly everything (these words, for example) typing on the computer, rarely write by hand and almost never print.
I do it: J E S S E L E E K E R C H E V A L. Though it does not look nearly that neat.
But really, he says, when we draw we use our whole bodies. He has me hold the charcoal as if I were shaking hands with it, the wooden holder lying across my curled fingers, my thumb resting in the groove near the edge. We move together, swinging our shoulders, marching our legs, making arcs with the our arms. And then we begin drawing ellipses, ovals on the page, trying to press so lightly at first that the line is invisible. The idea is once you decide where you want the line to be, you press harder, the line suddenly visible.
Can you feel the drawing in your whole body, he asks. In your feet?
I think about it. And I can.
* * * * *
I said before I had never had an art lesson but I must have had a few in elementary school. I remember a few art projects. Not drawing but doing things like glueing cotton balls to construction paper to make clouds — or was it sheep? I remember the great Thanksgiving ritual of tracing your hand and turning it into a turkey by making the thumb the head and the fingers the feathers. I have a sudden, tactile memory of holding the crayons, what it felt like to draw a line on the rough, slightly grey school paper with its odd chunks of wood. My turkey was always the worst. My teachers and even my mother remarked on it. Year after year.
I never took art in high school or college. Or signed up for a non-credit class of plein air drawing. I felt there had been different doors, back there in elementary school, for us clumsy vaguely artistic children. One was marked WORDS. And I chose to go through that one, without really even looking at the others.
But in March, when the pandemic hit while I was living in a rented 7th floor apartment on lockdown in Montevideo, Uruguay, I was suddenly, desperately in need of something to do that did not involve more hours sitting at the computer. I had gone, my husband in tow, to spend four months working on poetry translations. I was going to be translating during the day. At night I would be going to poetry readings, giving poetry readings, having drinks with poets, having poets to dinner. A life divided between the watch-repair intensity of translation which involves hours hunched over my laptop peering at silent words, and the social chatter of rooms full of words being spoken, performed, sung even. And in this case, Spanish words.
When the stay at home orders hit, my friends back in the States threw themselves into Marie Kondo-ing their houses, sorting through clothes, books, old toys, and boxing them to donate some day when people were willing to risk touching other people’s things again. But I was in a rental apartment. I had arrived with a small suitcase and had nothing to give away. Or sort. The second popular choice was baking bread. But my husband baked bread. Good bread. And he needed something to do in lockdown as well. Choice three was gardening — but we did not have so much as a balcony. We replanted a basil we bought at the market and put it by the kitchen window. I named her Vera. But there is only so much care a plant with four leaves really needs even during a pandemic.
Our physical contact with the outside was reduced to a once a week, nervous, masked trip to the nearby small supermarket, which had stayed open, as did pharmacies, because they were deemed “essential.” One week, when I was hurrying the three blocks to our Ta-Ta (¡En todo Uruguay! ¡Con todos los Uruguayos!) for groceries, I saw someone ring the door buzzer of an office and school supply store and be shown in. I stopped and looked through the window. Clearly it, too, was essential, open so business people working at home could get printer paper and parents could buy extra school supplies for their kids’ now home-based lessons. I saw the clerk ringing up a stack of sketchbooks for the customer. I went on to the supermarket. But all week, I kept thinking about those sketchbooks. Notebooks you draw, rather than write, in. Notebooks full of Not Words.
The next week, I buzzed and was let in. Sure enough along with the paperclips, envelopes and receipt books was a small section of the kind of art supplies I recognized from when my son had gone to 7th grade in Uruguay on my first sabbatical year there ten years before. Boxes of colored markers, some big sketch pads, metal tins of colored pencils and of water colors. The markers (so bright, so permanent!) and the water colors (so pale, so potentially, wetly disastrous) scared me. So I chose a box of 72 Staedler colored pencils which had made the long journey from Germany to Montevideo. Pencils, to be honest, were the writerly choice. Even if they were colored, they were pencils, familiar companions of my word-based childhood. I bought the selection of 72 colors because the pandemic made me buy all I could when I went out, gave the whole world a feeling of impending scarcity. For the same reason, I also picked out three big pads of paper and took it all to the counter. I did it nervously. In my mask. But the equally masked clerk took her time to wrap it all carefully in white paper, then place it all in a large colorful bag before she sent me on my way, as if she knew I was buying myself a present.
I took it home and put it all on the small desk in the spare bedroom. The next morning, I opened the pencils. They were arranged in their metal box in three layers by delicate gradations of color. I picked one up and wrote the date on the top of the first page in the first pad of paper. And DAY 1. Then, in different colors for each letter, trying out the pencils: I wrote: I bought COLORED pencils. And But can I draw? I did a square for the window in the bedroom and some wobbly versions of the buildings outside. I labeled them “brick building” and beyond that “sky” and “sea” just in case. All of this is bunched in the top left hand corner of a intimidatingly large 9-x-13-inch white page.
But I kept at it, drawing every day, trying to keep a pandemic drawing journal even if I didn’t find it easy. Day 2: I drew my cup of tea and my lunch. Again, I carefully labeled them, and if my lunch had not labeled “grilled cheese and tomato sandwich,” I am not sure I would know what it was. Day 3: I traced my hand (hello Thanksgiving turkey!) but filled it in with doodle spirals using all 72 colors. In following days, there is a lemon cake (very yellow and, yes, labeled), an eggplant, a tomato. I couldn’t seem to manage to draw bigger, so I started splitting the page in two. Day 7: the top of the page includes the words “I wrote an essay about walls” — which was true. And a wall I drew, coloring in each stone with a different pencil color in the black to brown to tan shades. It looks like this:
Then there are more days of fruits and vegetables — pears are a repeating motif — that represent what I bought at the market. I also drew Vera, our pet basil plant. On Day 17, I decided I needed to find a version of myself I could draw, a cartoon me to inhabit the pages. I drew myself falling and realized I was definitely channeling The Little Prince. Proof those childhood books stay with you:
Then I drew me as monster:
And as a sheep. When I needed inspiration, I googled “simple drawings of turtles” or frogs or pencils and copied them as best I could. I made them look like me by giving them all round horn-rim glasses. I proved I read too much and did myself as a series of literary rats inspired by Shakespeare and Melville (Ratlet, Rattleby the Scrivener):
I kept it up for 55 days.
* * * * *
Then it got cold in Montevideo. There was no heat in the spare bedroom and so on Day 56, I stopped. I was too shy about drawing to do it on the dining room table next to where my husband had converted the sideboard into a standing desk (his solution to the problem of sitting and working on the computer all day). I could translate right next to him, even write poems, but draw — not so much.
* * * * *
Now, back in the hot summer of Wisconsin, I am standing over the drawing board my teacher had dropped off for me bound carefully in brown paper along with a small box with the charcoal holder, all neatly labeled, in a contact-less delivery that echoed the care of the store clerk in Montevideo.
I am taking an art lesson, risking being bad at something because the pandemic has taught me that if I die and leave a pile of published books or if I die and leave drawings of sheep, it is pretty much the same thing. And the pandemic has taught me that each day is a day you can do something you have never done before.
So I am standing and drawing ellipses with my whole body. Long ones, fat ones, tiny ones, some dark, some where the charcoal barely kisses the paper. As if my life depends on it. He tells me to let them intersect, to run off the page.
My teacher, who also plays the drums (and here I should confess here that rhythm is also something I feel I lack) is talking about jazz musicians, about practice and improvisation. He has another quotation for me, from Nassim Nicholas Taleb: We are hunters: we are only truly alive in those moments when we improvise.
This time, I do not stop to think of the words, as words, but I feel them. Feel what they mean. How they tell me what I am doing. Tell me this is what I want to do. To draw without googling “simple cartoon sheep.” To draw without putting it in words first.
Now, he says, pretend there is water coming in from the upper left hand corner of the page and making its way toward the bottom and start using your charcoal to shade in the water. This will create a sense of movement.
And I see it. I follow the water down to the edge of the page let it spread out, a dark charcoal flood.
I feel it in my feet.
And for one of those moments that is too rare during this pandemic, in this life, I am excited rather than afraid. Instead of drumming, low grade panic, I feel adrenaline as anticipation.
I feel joy.
And, for now, it looks like this:
