Observe and Identify

Ours was the smallest studio in the whole big warehouse but it had a garden view and ridiculously cheap rent. I had stumbled into sharing my first official artist’s studio because I knew a cartoonist who had hung onto his tiny space. After years of drawing inside books or within spare rooms or out in the open at the kitchen table, I was hungry for a space of my own (or almost my own) to make art. Only I didn’t really think I would make art. I was not sure what I’d do. The first couple of mornings I just went there and sat down. Then, slowly, I started to draw, to scribble, to paint. I had to. For all the broken, busted and beat up crap around that warehouse, there were amazing weeds, birds, dogs, and inspiring painters, sculptors, and photographers who sacrificed health insurance and stability to investigate shape, color and form and their own abilities to make something out of not much. I didn’t really know what I was doing then, but I needed to paint and figured if I spent $75 dollars a month on rent I would be obligated to make art.

I tried to get there in the early morning hours before my steady job from 11 to 7. I won’t lie to you and say that I was in the studio every seven a.m., but plenty of seven a.m.s I was. Sitting on a low couch, crouching over a lower drawing board, which was perched on top of the cartoonist’s old trunk. I’d make coffee, put on NPR and pour artists inks into endless plastic cups to be painted, spilled, and splashed onto endless sheets of white watercolor paper. Over a couple of years I sorted out a working method; I’d mix up Dixie cups full of colors with some kind of intensity (bold oranges, humble greys and greens, mysterious burgundies and indigos). After laying out the colors as smartly as I could, I would leave. Invariably, the next morning I’d wash out and then paint over everything it all fit together better. I would lay down marks with my brush and then immediately lift the colors up with paper towels or doilies or textured fabrics. I experimented with textures and shades and shapes, hoping that the sum total of all the parts would be a painting that held the eye captive. I thought if I could make someone look hard enough, they might see something important. All of the paintings I did that first year were started and stopped a dozen times. For every confident stroke of paint, there were more patches of doubt. I could play the part of a painter but I wasn’t so sure I really had a right to be an artist.
One lonely, quiet, early morning I dipped a wet paintbrush into a cup of deep dark blue paint and pulled out a roach. He was thoroughly blue — from his hard coat to his long thin antennae—, stiff, still, and having been completely submerged he was dripping paint. When my normal breathing returned I realized he was dead.

Both the early morning and the context of a studio prompted contemplation from everyday events so a bug in my paint was a crisis of conviction. Were these little creeps everywhere? Would they eat my paintings? How dirty was my studio? Who else was there? What makes a roach want to be in blue? Why was I there? More and more questions came. I calmed myself enough to take pictures of that bug, to mess more with the painting, wash my hands, turn off the coffee pot and get myself to my day job on time.

Not long after that roach showed up I told my boss I’d be leaving soon to have a go at being a working artist. Two years later I quit. I had business cards printed that announced my profession as an artist and settled in for the long haul at the studio. I quickly found myself running around taking more freelance jobs: teaching community education classes at a local art school, selling brushes at an art supply store, researching obscure museum pieces. I was still painting in my studio, but never at seven a.m.

As a perk I was permitted to take one free class at the art school where I was teaching. I signed up for a botanical drawing class that met on Saturday mornings. Nancy, the instructor, brought us to gardens and planted us all in front of calla lilies, cacti, ferns, or roses. She encouraged us to concentrate for a couple of hours on just one drawing, a slow, careful study. I didn’t tell anyone I was an artist (just kept those cards in my pocket) and I didn’t make much I liked, but this tightly focused weekly drawing practice was a corrective to my loosey-goosey studio spilling and splashing. I needed to look hard at the details. Near the end of the course Nancy and I fell into a natural conversation about all the jobs we had worked, all the strange things we had been fascinated by, and how finally we knew something. We laughed at how long it took us to realize we were artists. Just as I’d taken her class to try drawing tightly again, Nancy signed up to take my sketchbook class to loosen up. One night I gathered the sketchbookers together and brought them to the art school gallery where an exhibition of huge digital scans of moths was hanging, each suspended on the walls or the center of the space. Before we stepped in I asked, what color is a moth? Most said grey or brown, but Nancy’s face lit up.

Once surrounded by those big bold bugs, we couldn’t avoid the bold blues, deep greens, orangey-reds. Nancy had spent months in the woods with etymologists studying and drawing bugs in order to use her artistic talents to study science. She learned to see details of behavior by observing tiny creatures like moths. We walked around staring at the hanging bugs. I asked her quietly why she didn’t teach a scientific drawing class with an emphasis on insects. Nobody would take a bug drawing class, she told me. Maybe so, in the real world but everyone needs to be able to draw flies.

Fast forward and you’ll find my road has taken me halfway across the country, day-jobbing again. This time I earn a small living making sure everything goes smoothly with community arts classes at a regional museum. I phone parent when kids vomit in clay class, I repeat like a mantra that “yes, you can draw if you simply try”, I talk folks like Nancy into teaching classes they are passionate about and then find those folks dreaming about but deadly afraid of drawing bugs for three hours a week. In the evenings and on my days off, I make art. I have to.
A few days ago, after dinner and after I had stopped thinking about a woman with Multiple Sclerosis who is having more and more difficulty coming to her drawing class but simply loves to draw, I was painting. I put down wet shapes near wet shapes, crowding out one shape to float in another. I had mixed a deep burgundy red and with my floppy brush I made imperfect, almost an inch square marks close to each other, up and down the left side of the paper. Instead of letting the wet paint touch, I left little moats of white space, places where the eye could rest.
In those moats I noticed, as I looked and blinked and looked again, walked a small red ant. He snuck in from the floor and was about to walk across the wetness of my wet painting. I stopped caring about the forms, and just wanted to know what he was going to do. Step through the burgundy to the yellow green to the white space on the right? Will he make tiny little marks? Will he drown? I stopped and watched. He walked a bit and then bumped right into a new wet patch, he stopped, shook, moved his body and tried a different approach, He avoided a narrow passageway and again hit and repelled away from a wet spot. He was literally painted into a corner, stuck, just a little ant in a maze I made. He was just a mark, but a living one.

The more I watched, the more I thought about him. I found a paper towel and carefully blotted a dark red, very wet area near the border. He tentatively, and then more confidently, stepped towards the pink and back onto the floor. I picked my brush up again but nothing I made that night was worth keeping. I tore the four feet of paper into small swatches of color and maybe I’ll be able to fit them together in better harmony the next time I try.

The next day I called the student to tell her that we could credit her the remaining classes. Anytime that she felt well enough to come in and draw, she was welcome. She didn’t need to feel stuck or alone. My friend, I said, You are an artist.

— Rachael Baldanza, December 2004

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Latest changes made January 26, 2005.

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