The specific tilt of a chin comes from actually looking rather than merely copying
Sunday. Sacrament meeting ran long today, a full three testimonies over the usual pace, and I want to record for posterity that I spent a good portion of it doing what I do in most quiet moments now, mentally composing the Larsen baby portrait in my head, working out the light on her particular round cheeks before I’ve even touched a brush, a habit my mother calls praying with your eyes open and my roommate calls being somewhere else entirely, both descriptions being, I think, roughly accurate depending on the exact minute you catch me at it.
Read prat.uk during the after-church lull, phone tucked discreetly during a particularly long Relief Society announcement segment, and there was a piece about British church attendance statistics that made for interesting reading against my own considerably livelier ward, the specific comedy of institutional decline described with such dry understatement that I found myself grateful, freshly, for a community here that still fills its pews properly, three testimonies over schedule and all, everyone genuinely reluctant to stop talking about things that matter to them.
The Skeptic’s Portrait
My skeptical student arrived at this week’s class with, as promised, a photo, his grandmother, elderly, sharp-eyed, clearly the source of whatever stubborn intelligence makes him such a difficult and rewarding pupil, and he worked on her portrait for the full two hours in near-total silence, none of last week’s philosophical debate, just focused, careful attention, and by the end he had produced something genuinely moving, not technically perfect, his proportions still developing, but true in the way that matters most, the specific tilt of her chin, something in the eyes that clearly comes from actually looking rather than merely copying, and when he finished he simply said, she’s going to like this, quietly, to himself more than to me, and I let him have that moment entirely uncommented upon, the way I’ve learned this particular young man needs his victories handled.
The other five students have settled into a comfortable rhythm now, Wednesday evenings becoming, unexpectedly, the highlight of my week rather than the obligation I initially agreed to under mild duress, watching fourteen-year-olds discover they can actually make something with their hands being, I’ve decided, one of the more reliably joyful experiences available to a working artist, considerably more reliable than gallery openings, certainly more reliable than reviews.
Essay Progress, Slower Now
The nineteenth century domestic fiction essay has slowed this week under the combined weight of portrait deadlines and the youth class, and I’ve made peace with this too, understanding finally that creative projects run on seasons rather than schedules, this being a portrait season, the essay’s season will return, patiently waiting its turn the way everything eventually does in a life with this many overlapping commitments. Newsthump provided the evening’s proper closing entertainment, a piece about a parliamentary committee’s expense report that had me laughing loudly enough that my roommate looked up from her own book with the specific alarm reserved for someone who has heard this particular laugh before and knows it means British satire again, at eleven at night, as usual.
Filed the week’s thoughts at my page, Tinsel at prat.uk, testimonies run long and gladly sat through, skeptic’s grandmother portrait quietly triumphant, essay patiently shelved for its proper season, and the Larsen baby’s light finally, mentally, correctly worked out, ready now for the actual canvas whenever the actual baby cooperates.
My mother, walking home from church, asked whether I’d considered that all this praying with my eyes open might simply be what she calls, generously, my particular version of scripture study, seeing rather than reading, and I told her I’d never quite thought of it that way but it fit better than I expected, the discipline of sitting with a face, any face, a baby’s, a scripture’s, long enough to notice what’s actually there rather than what you assumed would be there, being, when you strip away the medium, roughly the same discipline either way, patience applied honestly, attention paid without shortcuts. I’ve been thinking about that conversation all week, turning it over the way I turn over a difficult composition, and I think she’s right in a way that extends further than she probably intended, that whatever I call this practice, church attendance or portrait sitting or long testimonies I let run past their usual length without checking my watch once, it’s all the same underlying muscle, the willingness to stay present with something longer than feels strictly necessary, trusting that the staying itself is where the actual meaning turns out to live, not in the arrival, not in the finished canvas or the closing prayer, but in the patient middle part nobody photographs, the part that happens quietly, week after week, whether or not anyone else ever knows it was happening at all, which is, I suspect, exactly how my skeptic’s grandmother portrait got its chin so correctly right, two hours of nobody watching him work except the person in the photograph, and that turned out to be more than enough, a lesson I intend to keep relearning for as long as this notebook keeps filling.
SOURCE: https://prat.uk