[Lady of Lore]: 394.The True 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 cherry wood easel sketching. Large eggshell colored cardstock paper lay before me beside a small rectangular mirror that I glanced into while I sketched with a stick of graphite. My eyes flickered back and forth from the page to my face as I carefully noted the contour of my almond eyes and the gentle curve of my slightly Japanese nose. Yet, no matter the pains took, I found that I could not capture the look I wanted.
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 eyed the page critically, 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. "Why can't I draw myself?" I thought to myself as I walked down the stairs twirling the graphite in my hand.
Along the stairwell my glance fell on two paintings my Grandma had painted. I stopped and admired them, an usual habit I had when I went downstairs. I looked at them and sighed. My Grandma made painting with oils seems effortless. She captured momnets and indescribable emotions with the 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 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, the way 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 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 could find no major error. 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 in Mighty Dog commercials. Her huge black radar ears laid flat against her neck like plane wings and her finger long pink tongue lolled out one side of her mouth as she bounded onto my feet.
"Oona!" I squeaked in delight. She flattened her already pushed back ears farther and motored 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 was hit with a narcaleptic fit and fell 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. When I'd had my wisdom teeth out and my face was swollen beyond recognition she still knew me without hesitation. It gave me the idea of asking someone else he 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. 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. The flaws are 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 had not been drawing me. I understood that my imperfections were what made me beautiful and most importantly, what made me simply, me.