Playing through imperfection

The primary reason that it took me -- what -- 62 years? -- to become a painter, or to allow my painter genes expression, is that I learned early on that I can't draw.

I can no longer enumerate the number of drawing classes I've had, or the number of times either mathematicians or artists have attempted to teach me about perspective, but the truth is: it just never took.

Like my friend Janet, who will forever be mystified by the process of selecting the correct size of tupperware to accommodate her leftovers, I have something in me that just... doesn't get it.

So when I look at this painting -- which, I have to say, was sheer joy to create -- what I see is all the ways the perspective is broken/off/imperfect.  So even though I love it, it makes me happy, it reminds me of one of my favorite places in the world, I just feel apologetic about it when I think about showing it to anyone else.

What IS that thing, that is so painfully conscious of what others might think, that it shuts down and cringes in shame at the thought of exposure?  Why can I not laugh, like my friend Alice, and say "perspective is highly overrated?"

The bad news is that fear of failing, of looking foolish/stupid/imperfect keeps me from trying new things.  The good news is that I cope with that fear by encouraging myself to try new things -- which means, in the end, that I've been crazy enough to tackle a lot of stuff that some of my friends find astonishing and overwhelming.

"How do you have the courage to do that?" and "Ohmigosh, I could never do what you do" are phrases I hear often.  And they generally make me feel a little sad: it feels like people are dropping me into the "artsy" box, sort of the "well, of course, SHE can do that because she's so ARTSY" category -- which means I'm one of those things that's not like the others.

But it's also sad because I wish there were more people out there pushing themselves to do the hard stuff, so they could see how much fun it is to grow.  When I feel like I'm setting an example -- you CAN try, you CAN do this -- so much more often I become, well, threatening, which was never my intent.

Or was it? You can't be an introspective human without understanding how hard each of us works to gain approval, to feel special, to be loved.  So however altruistic my intentions, isn't it also true that some part of me is seeking to impress?

When I begin to explore all these dimensions, I realize that the root of it all, beneath all the noble and ignoble motivations, is just that I love to play; that when I'm playing -- whether with paint, or on stage, with a poem or in a blog: that's when I feel most myself, when I'm having the most fun.  Which isn't to say it's not stressful -- I have a teacher who'll happily tell you a partially completed canvas is quite capable of bringing me to tears of frustration.  But I love what I'm doing.  And even though the results aren't perfect -- nor do they even come close to paying the bills -- I'm going to keep on doing it as long as I can. Because it feels like this was what I was born to do.