Back before I became the worrier and perfectionist I have been for so long, I was a very little girl with a big box of crayons.
There I am, at three or four, sitting on a shiny wooden floor, with my 48 Crayola crayons strewn around me, and one or two sheets of paper. I am drawing. I am putting shapes and colors, squiggles and dots down there on that paper.
I am drawing my brother who is four years older than me. I make a big round circle and I put his eyes in and a v for his little pointed nose and somehow I've got his mouth down and then I take my brown crayon and make many, many dots all over… those are his freckles. I gasp. It is perfect! It looks just like him.
I decide to put emerald green nostrils on the lady’s face I am drawing because they will make her face perfect. Perfect... those beautiful jewel-green shapes. I put two more emerald squiggles on her ears. There! Now her nostrils and her earrings match. The world is happy and bright, and emerald green figures largely in it. Ahhhh.
At (too many) times in the past 3 (or 30) years, I'd get overtaken with panic and doubt about my work. It could get pretty bad. My angelic therapist told me:
She said, "Think back to a time when you loved what you were doing, when you painted and drew with complete joy and no self-consciousness." That's when I found myself again... me and my box of crayons.
Here I am, a bit younger than the little Laura with the 48 crayons, but can't you just tell there's going to be lots of crayoning in her future?
She's still there, when I'm not lost or hobbled with worry, and she's calling the shots, the colors, the shapes, and the dots.
Thank you so much, Christina! I do wake up with the equivalent of the box of 48 crayons! Right now I'm using scissors and flinging paint!
Posted by: Laura | August 02, 2015 at 06:43 PM
What a lovely image of little Laura with her colors! This is still very much you - don't doubt yourself! I hope you wake up every morning with your box of crayons beside your bed ready for whatever beautiful adventures the day will bring you. :)
Posted by: Christina | July 30, 2015 at 09:51 PM
Marly, those are good questions... and I know how you have struggled with how the larger world values/doesn't value the work of poets and novelists. But you ARE making beautiful and true work and that is what, on our death beds, will really matter to us. And before our death beds, too! We visual artists have the added joy of being able to surround ourselves with our work, hang it on our walls and to experience our paintings/drawings/illustrations in their entirety pretty easily... as opposed to writers and musicians for whom the work is revealed over the time it takes to read it or perform it. These daily glimpses, often by happenstance and usually at an oblique angle, really keep me going.
Posted by: Laura | July 02, 2015 at 07:09 AM
Thank you so much, Sandra! But I clearly see your younger self (as I imagine her) in YOUR paintings, too! You have a more controlled/realistic painting style than mine, but that really has nothing to do with the inner ebullience you, too, seem to have been born with! Thank you for your lovely comment.
Posted by: Laura | July 02, 2015 at 07:01 AM
What a great post Laura - So thought provoking! I wish my younger self would show her face more often in my art! There's nothing like 'assuming' we can draw and as children, that's exactly what we all do - before we start worrying what other people think! Beautiful drawings too - of course!
Posted by: sandra busby | July 02, 2015 at 05:51 AM
A beautiful trajectory... A path well worth the taking, little and big Laura!
I wonder why I ever worried about anything connected with what I make. Why was it so important to do anything but make the most best, most beautiful and true stories and poems possible, and to leap out farther and farther as I progressed? What did it matter, in a country increasingly focused on material success as a measure of everything, including art, whether I gained worldly success or not?
Posted by: marly youmans | July 01, 2015 at 09:58 AM