Painting

About a year and a half ago, I started painting with acrylics. This is something I’m really proud of—not because I’m very good at painting but just because I have found the courage again, after a long time, to try to paint.

Drawing was my first love as a human being. As a child, I used to draw all the time—and I remember that I had very strong feelings about drawing even at a young age, at six, maybe even at four. There was so much ugliness and fear in my life, in our house, and I remember thinking that drawing was the only path to beauty that was open to me. I didn’t have a pretty face, I’d been told, or pretty clothes, and drawing was my only hope, I thought, the only way that I could reach the Land of Beauty, a tantalizing, far-off place surrounded by moats and fog.

I remember being so frustrated by drawing. I wanted to get better at it, but I didn’t know how. I didn’t have the type of parents who would sign me up for art lessons or buy me art supplies or encourage me, say, “Don’t give up! Just keep trying!” No. So I would tear up my drawings. I would cry. I remember sitting in my closet and crying, when I was nine or ten, because my hands were so clumsy, because I couldn’t draw what I glimpsed in my mind—the distant towers and turrets in the Land of Beauty.

And then when I was in ninth grade, I took a 3-D art class at school. I was extremely, ridiculously shy and afraid to assert myself, to take my turn with the various tools that we students were supposed to share. I sat at my desk and tried to make something without any tools, and the result was terrible—babyish and messy, the worst in the whole class.

I had to endure a critique. Everybody was supposed to chime in. The teacher said my piece was sloppy, and the kids said similar things. And of course they were right. It was sloppy! Their criticism was justified and not meant to hurt me, but I let it hurt me. I took it so hard, felt it so deeply. My whole concept of myself changed, changed completely; I decided that I wasn’t creative or artistic, and I never signed up for another art class in high school.

I still drew at home, in private, but drawing was no longer really part of my notion of myself. I thought I was terrible at it. I thought I had no right to do it.

And after a while I became afraid to draw, afraid to try because I was sure I would fail. This went on for a very long time and caused me all kinds of sorrow. Not drawing was a huge, secret source of pain.

I didn’t draw for about 30 years! But then, in 2013, I bought some pastels and I tried to make a picture. I was terrified. I told myself the only rule was that I had to finish it—and I did. I did finish it. That year, I completed maybe four or five pictures. The next year, I finished a few more.

I wasn’t mean to myself about these pictures. I didn’t criticize them. I took joy in them. I was drawing! Every time I got out my pastels, I was scared. But I triumphed. I faced down my fear. I made a little picture—time and time again.

Then in 2018, I bought an inexpensive set of acrylic paints. I started painting. It was so much fun! I’d sit (and still do now) at the dining room table and listen to audio books and paint portraits of my teddy bears. I don’t judge my paintings. I don’t care if they’re bad. I simply enjoy making them, and every time I pick up my brush it’s a victory, a victory over my greatest enemy—myself.