Art History & Bathroom Stall Poetry
Dear __,
There are better things I should be doing tonight instead of writing a letter to nobody but, that’s the whole reason I do this. It’s absolutely ridiculous to write letters to nobody but I already told you I just like to write and sometimes letters about nothing are the best letters to get.
It’s really tempting to try turning these letters into lessons or something but, if you write to your friends, that’s not what you do. Since I’m publishing this as a blog, it seems like it should have some point? Like help improve your life, give you some advice, or tell you my opinion about something relevant.
But I won’t do that to you. I’ll just tell you what I’m up to, which is writing poetry.
I always wanted to be an artist, but I never set out to be a poet, I always thought it would be better to be a painter. Specifically, someone who could paint realistic portraits of people’s faces because, according to my 5th grade art teacher, that is the best kind of art. First we learned about how far away our eyes should be from our lips, then we drew our faces. Mrs. Thomas would hang them all up and we spent a lot of time admiring one with perfectly penciled nostrils and symmetrical eyeballs and I knew, then and there, that I would never be an artist.
But, because I wanted to be an artist, I went to college and studied Architecture and then Art History. This meant I took a lot of studio art classes. I love to get dirty and be creative, but damn, I never got the hang of mixing oils. My hands are clumsy and vague when it comes to paints, charcoals, pencils, crayons, or markers. And practicing techniques gives me the heebie-jeebies and makes my hands twitch just thinking about it. The truth is that I don’t want to get “good at” any kind of visual art.
How did I learn this valuable lesson? From Rob, my cartoon instructor. A few years ago I drew a silly cartoon in my notebook. I thought I might be the next New York Times cartoonist, something like the Far Side but happier. I’d be in every issue. So, I signed up for cartoon lessons and met Rob. It’s been about three years and you know what? I’m still terrible at drawing. But that’s OK, because Rob taught me that’s not the point of a cartoon. The point of a cartoon is to give the audience just enough information to get the joke, get the idea, get the feeling. Cartoons don’t even have to be funny. The point is to take an idea out of your head and get it down so someone else can understand it.
Once I released the idea that I was going to create the next Calvin and Hobbes, I just used my weekly lesson like a therapy session. I would come up with a million brilliant ideas and follow through on none of them. I’d talk with Rob for 45 minutes about the etymology, psychology, and personal stories behind an idea. I drew things that made me pee my pants laughing. I drew cartoons that my family hangs on their wall.
I’m still sensitive about it, I don’t really want to show you my drawings. After all - it’s a lot to face so many years of thinking one way about yourself. That you’re not an artist unless you can paint perfectly realistic oil paintings of your fifth grade face.
Did you even know there was a thing called Art History? I didn’t when I went to college. I found it accidentally because I was an Architecture major. I loved studying Architecture. I especially loved the giant pieces of translucent vellum and the noise they made like a drumhead, and how the soft graphite pencils slid across them. I loved AutoCAD, too but I didn’t want to be responsible for the structural integrity of anything. So, Art History it was.
What’s awesome about Art History is that you’re not just studying masterpieces or artifacts or buildings. What you’re studying is how humans find meaning, how they seek the divine, and how they communicate this to each other by creating beautiful things in the face of harsh realities.
You also study the artists themselves, and learn that the idea of a struggling, individualist, self-conscious artist is pretty new, when you’re thinking in millennia.
You learn to ask questions like: When did people start thinking that “realistic” was better? When did they start defining “realistic” as perfectly spaced eyeballs? Who decides these things? And . . . why do we all go along with it?
I learned the art of deep observation. I learned the art of appreciating and articulating layers upon layers of simultaneous meaning.
I still dream of becoming an Art History professor, though I never applied to graduate school (I thought I needed to get good at painting first, which wasn’t true, but I must have been too afraid to really check). But my first real job was in a museum, The Clark Art Institute, and that was pretty damn cool.
It only recently occurred to me, after I started publishing my poems regularly, that I am a writer. And writers are artists. And I love to get better at writing. I will read the dictionary for fun. I will happily commit to shaping a poem for as long as it takes. I will write 60,000 words of a book just to say what I mean. I will write letters to nobody and try to get better at it every week because I just can’t help myself.
Anyway, I consider myself lucky to realize all this now, while I still have time left to enjoy being an artist. Lucky to not still be sad that my faces aren’t as good as what’s-his-name that Mrs. Thomas loved so much.
My drawings may be silly, but my poems are a little better. And that’s not the point anyway - the point is taking cartooning lessons for three years when you know you’ll never make the New York Times because you don’t even want to try to make the New York Times, because that would take all the fun out of it.
The point is writing poetry and publishing it without any hashtags, maybe taping it up on a street light or a bathroom stall. The point is just to make something you think is interesting, beautiful, and true. Like . . . a letter to nobody about being an artist. Because that’s the fun part.
xx,
-m-
I found the mother-lode stash of kinda dark typewriter poetry and very silly cartoons from a couple years ago. The actual scribbles are from my son, I swear.
I wonder what it’s like to be a superhero?
I wonder where I’d go if I could fly around downtown?
From some other planet I’d get this funky high on a yellow sun,
Boy I bet my friends will all be stunned
They’re stunned
Straight up what did you hope to learn about here?
If I was someone else would this all fall apart?
I figured, since I talked about Rob the cartoonist, you might also like to listen to some peak 90s art by Rob the singer. Enjoy belting it out, it’s good stuff. We got this record in the mail today, we’ve been singing it to each other for days.
(Real World by Matchbox 20)