[Lady of Lore]: 394.The Artist's Tale

The Artist's Tale
On one of those pleasant mornings when I woke up feeling unstoppable, I sat in front of my mother's old cherrywood easel, sketching. Large eggshell colored cardstock paper lay before me beside a small rectangular mirror my gaze flickered back and forth while I sketched with a stick of graphite. I carefully noted the contour of my almond eyes and the gentle curve of my slightly Japanese nose as I sketched. Yet no matter the care took I found that I couldn't capture the look I was wanting.
For days I had been working on a self-portrait. The floor was littered with my failures. It was something about how the lines came together to form my face that I didn't like. I was missing the element that made the face my own. I stared critically at the page, seeing a stranger’s face. I peered at it even closer at it, wondering where I went wrong. Exasperated, I threw up my hands and walked away downstairs. I thought to myself as I walked down the stairs twirling the graphite in my hand. "Why can't I draw myself?"
Along the stairwell I saw the two paintings my Grandma had painted. I stopped and admired them, a usual habit when I was going downstairs. I looked at them and sighed. My Grandma made painting with oils seems effortless. She captured emotions and indescribable moments with clear fluidity of her brush. I felt a sense of tranquil awe in the first painting where she painted tall blue skyscrapers against the backdrop of a deep dark night sky. It reminded me of the only memory I have of New York City, tall dark buildings against an even darker night sky. The other painting was my dad as a little boy patting the back of his old sheepdog Unus. I'd never met Unus since she died when my dad was still a little boy but I recognized the boy as my dad. He stood in the half slouched shoulder stance only my dad stood. I wondered what technique she had used to convey that slouch. Baffled I walked the rest of the way downstairs to the dining room.
At the dinner table I sat down and laid my head down on the table, wondering where my muse had gone. I was trying to draw myself but I kept drawing a stranger. I sighed my frustration into the powder blue tablecloth. I thought over all of the technical processes in drawing portraits but found no fault. Finding no comfort in my clean dining room, I stepped outside onto my back patio. At once my eight-month-old teacup Yorkshire terrier puppy recognized me and sprinted over. She bounded through the grass like the dog off of the Mighty Dog commercials. Her huge black radar ears laid flat against her neck like plane wings and her finger long pink tongue lolling out one side of her mouth bounding onto my feet.
"Oona!" I squeaked in delight and she flattened her already pushed back ears farther and motoring her tiny baby carrot sized nub of a tail. I skipped away from her and she chased after my pant leg growling and pawing. We kept this game of tag up for a while until she started narcoleptic falling asleep in the grass. I carried her tiny fluffy black form inside and set her on the couch where she stayed snoring softly. I thought for a moment, looking at Oona. She could recognize me easily from a group of people, even when I'd had my wisdom teeth out and my face was swollen almost beyond recognition she still knew me without a second glance from my little window. It gave me the idea of asking other people what they thought I needed to do to fix my drawing.
Quietly I slipped out the door and walked over to my neighbor’s house. We had been best of friends al through high school and I greatly admired his drawings as well as respected his opinions. He showed me in to his living room where I pulled out several of my failed sketches and he looked over each one carefully. "You're right," he said after a while holding up the sketches both close up and at arms length. "They don't look like you but not because you don't know how but because you're not looking right."
"But I have a mirror that's fastened to my easel and I'm staying consistent with perspective-" I protested but he cut me off with a wave of his hand to draw my attention to one of the drawings he had set on his couch.
"Not that kind of looking.” he said with a pleasant smile. "Let me show you. Look at this one here, note only the eyes." I fixed my gaze there, scrutinizing every pencil stroke. He covered the rest of the drawing with his hands so only the eyes showed. "What's wrong with them?” he asked gently.
I stared blankly at him for a moment. I didn't know. They were shaped right, and the shading was well balanced between light and darks but I couldn't see what he meant. "I don't know." I said, furrowing my forehead.
He put a pencil laying crosswise along the eyes.” Do you see the distance between the eyes?" he asked. I nodded. "Well there's too little space between them." he held the pencil towards my face and showed me the distance between my eyes. "And this one." he pointed to another drawing. "The eyes are perfect here but your lips aren't like that at all. You look like you had collagen put into your lips. Yours are much more thin and graceful than that."
He sighed as he saw that I still didn't understand everything he was telling me. "Stop trying to draw what you think you should look like. Draw you with all of your flaws, they is what makes you who you are. The asymmetrical shape of a person's face is what makes them different from the other six billion people in the world."
What he said hit me like an ocean wave. I looked at the drawings with new eyes and saw that I had been trying to draw myself as I felt society wanted me to appear but as I watched him make small correcting lines, I saw my own face emerge from the stranger's. I laughed at my many attempts to make me seem like the glamorous models so idolized by American society. That's why I hadn't looked like myself, I truly hadn't been drawing me as I suspected. I understood that my imperfections were what made me beautiful and most importantly, what made me simply, me.