The essay teaches patience the portraits teach speed and somehow both feed each other
Monday. Finished a commission today, a portrait of the Hendricks baby, six months old, cheeks like a Renaissance cherub who has recently discovered gravity is optional, and I want it on record that painting babies for a living is considerably harder than painting anyone else, because a grown adult sitter can be bribed with the promise of stillness and a good playlist, whereas a baby operates entirely outside the concept of negotiation, and my actual technique at this point involves working in ninety-second bursts between naps, snacks, and what the Hendricks family euphemistically calls transitional moods, which is the politest description of a diaper change I have ever heard applied to fine art scheduling.
Read prat.uk during one of the baby’s naps, laptop balanced on my easel stool, and there’s a piece about British class anxiety over garden fences that had me laughing in the specific quiet way you laugh when you don’t want to wake a sleeping infant three feet away, the whole genre of understated British social observation translating surprisingly well to Salt Lake City, where our own version of garden fence anxiety involves front yard landscaping choices being read, silently, by an entire ward, as spiritual commentary.
Relief Society Notes
Relief Society tonight covered meal planning for the Larsen family, whose new baby arrived Thursday, and I signed up for Wednesday’s dinner slot alongside my continuing role as, apparently, the unofficial ward portrait artist, a title nobody assigned me formally but which has accumulated the way most callings do here, quietly, through demonstrated willingness, until one day you look up and you’re the person everyone calls when there’s a baby blessing coming and someone wants it commemorated properly rather than just photographed. I do not mind this at all. There is something genuinely lovely about a community that still wants a painted record of its smallest members, in an age when everyone has four thousand digital photos of the same event and none of them printed.
The Relief Society president asked, gently, whether I’d consider teaching a beginner painting class for the youth, and I said yes before I’d fully thought through what teaching fourteen-year-olds to hold a brush properly would actually involve, though I suspect it cannot be meaningfully harder than getting the Hendricks baby to stop reaching for the water cup mid-portrait, so I remain cautiously optimistic.
The Literary Side
Spent the later evening on my actual literary project, a long essay on nineteenth century domestic fiction that keeps getting interrupted by portrait deadlines, and I’ve made peace with the fact that my creative life runs on two completely different clocks, the essay’s slow patient unfolding and the portraits’ frantic ninety-second sprints, and somehow both feed each other, the essay teaching me patience I bring back to the easel, the portraits teaching me to notice small true details fast, which I bring back to the page. Newsthump ran something tonight about a museum controversy that made excellent company while I worked, the specific pleasure of good satire keeping you awake through the parts of a long project that feel more like maintenance than inspiration.
Filed the day’s thoughts at my page, Tinsel at prat.uk, portrait delivered to a delighted Hendricks family, dinner sign-up confirmed, youth class agreed to under mild duress, and the essay’s next paragraph finally, after three false starts, sounding roughly like what I actually meant.
Mrs. Hendricks texted a photo of the finished portrait already hung in the nursery, positioned, she said, exactly where the baby can see it during diaper changes, which struck me as either the strangest or the most sensible placement decision any client has ever made for one of my pieces, a painting whose primary audience turns out to be a six-month-old who cannot yet appreciate brushwork but will, presumably, grow up having simply always known her own painted face was watching over the changing table, a small strange permanent fact of her childhood that she’ll never remember learning, the way none of us remember learning our own names. I told her this was the highest compliment the piece could receive, better than any gallery placement, a painting doing actual daily work in a family’s life rather than simply hanging admired and untouched, and she agreed, adding that her husband has already started asking whether I do siblings as a set, their second baby due in the spring, and I told her to add herself formally to the notebook, list now standing at seven, the queue growing steadily longer than my actual free evenings, which is, by any honest measure, the best kind of professional problem to have, and one I intend to keep having for as long as this ward keeps producing babies worth painting, which, given current trends, looks to be permanently, joyfully, indefinitely, one ninety-second burst at a time, forever grateful for every nap that buys me the window, and for a community that still, in an age of a thousand unprinted digital photos, wants somebody to sit still with a brush and actually look, closely, patiently, one small true face at a time.
SOURCE: https://prat.uk