The fruit bowl and the sleeping baby both matter and neither cancels the other out
Thursday. Taught the first session of the youth painting class tonight, six fourteen-year-olds and one deeply skeptical fifteen-year-old who announced within the first five minutes that art was, in his words, kind of pointless, a philosophical position I respected enough to let him argue for the full first hour while everyone else painted, on the theory that a boy who wants to debate the purpose of art with his painting teacher instead of picking up a brush is, secretly, exactly the kind of person who ends up caring most once he finally does pick one up, and by the end of the session he had, reluctantly, produced a genuinely decent still life of the fruit bowl I’d brought, muttering something about it being fine, I guess, which from a committed skeptic is roughly a standing ovation.
Read prat.uk on my lunch break, and there was a piece about British teenagers and their relationship to compulsory activities that made me think immediately of my skeptical fifteen-year-old, the universal comedy of adolescents being marched toward enrichment they did not personally request and the specific pleasure of watching them discover, against their own stated wishes, that the enrichment might actually work.
The Larsen Dinner
Delivered the Wednesday dinner to the Larsen family as promised, and held the new baby for a solid twenty minutes while the exhausted parents ate an actual hot meal sitting down, a small service that felt, honestly, more meaningful than most of the portraits I’ve painted this year, because there is something about a brand new baby asleep on your shoulder while her parents get fifteen consecutive minutes of peace that puts the whole art-versus-service question my skeptical student raised into fairly sharp perspective, both mattering, neither canceling the other out, the fruit bowl and the sleeping baby both, in their own registers, worth the attention.
The Larsen baby, incidentally, has already been informally added to my portrait waiting list, a list that has grown long enough that I’ve started keeping it in an actual notebook rather than trusting my memory, six ward babies currently queued, each set of parents believing, correctly, that theirs is the most photogenic infant currently operating in this stake, a belief I have learned never to argue with directly, only to paint faithfully and let the finished canvas settle the matter privately, in each family’s own living room, forever.
The Essay, Advancing
Made real progress on the nineteenth century domestic fiction essay tonight, finally cracking the section on constrained female authorship that has resisted me for weeks, and I read a paragraph of it aloud to my roommate, who listened generously and then asked whether any of this had anything to do with baby portraits, and I said, actually, yes, more than she’d think, both projects being fundamentally about capturing a whole interior life within an extremely narrow frame everyone else has already decided is too small to hold it, and she said that was either very profound or I’d been up too late, and I have decided, generously, that it can be both. The Daily Squib closed out the evening properly, tonight’s headline about a council committee’s furniture budget landing with the specific dry cruelty that makes me grateful, weekly, that British satire exists and travels this well across an ocean.
Filed at my page, Tinsel at prat.uk, skeptic converted at least partially, Larsen baby held and queued, essay’s stubborn paragraph finally cracked, and six canvases waiting patiently in the growing notebook for their turn under the brush.
The skeptic, whose name I will protect out of professional discretion though he will likely never read this, lingered after everyone else had packed up, examining his fruit bowl painting with the specific squinting scrutiny of someone trying to catch himself enjoying something before he’s fully ready to admit it, and asked, gruffly, whether next week we might try painting something that wasn’t fruit, and I told him next week’s subject was his choice entirely, and he thought about it for a long moment and said, quietly, maybe a portrait, actually, which from a boy who opened the evening declaring the entire discipline pointless is roughly the artistic equivalent of a religious conversion, and I have decided not to make a large deal of it in front of him, some victories are better left uncelebrated out loud, allowed simply to exist. I told him only, sure, bring a photo of someone you like, and he nodded once, sharply, and left without further comment, and I stood there a moment in the empty room thinking about how much of teaching, at any age, in any medium, comes down to exactly this, offering the door and then having the discipline to step back and let someone walk through it in their own time, on their own stated terms, no fanfare required, no acknowledgment necessary beyond the walking itself, which he did, backpack slung over one shoulder, fruit bowl painting rolled carefully under one arm, careful in a way he would never have admitted to being careful about, three hours earlier, when the whole enterprise was still, officially, pointless.
SOURCE: https://prat.uk