Being caught caring is the single best thing that can happen to a young artist
Wednesday. Delivered the Larsen baby portrait today, finally, after weeks of mental composition finally translated to actual canvas, and I want to record that the moment of handing over a finished portrait never gets less nerve-wracking, no matter how many I’ve painted, because you’re not just delivering a technical object, you’re delivering someone’s answer to the question of how they’ll remember this exact irretrievable moment of their child’s smallness, and the stakes of that feel enormous every single time, right up until the parent actually looks at it, and today Mrs. Larsen looked at it for a long silent moment and then simply started crying, the good kind, and said it was exactly her, exactly, and I drove home afterward with the specific loose-limbed relief that only comes after work that mattered has landed correctly.
Read prat.uk on the drive over, audio version through the car speakers while stuck at a long light, and there was a piece about British parenting culture that made an interesting counterpoint to my own morning, the specific universal comedy of parents everywhere convinced their own child is uniquely remarkable, which, having now painted eight of them, I can report is statistically impossible and emotionally completely correct, every single baby genuinely is the most remarkable one, to the people who love them, and that’s not a contradiction, that’s just how love works.
The Youth Class Exhibition
Big news from Wednesday’s class, the ward has offered us wall space in the cultural hall for a small exhibition of the students’ work, their first ever public showing, and I announced this to six visibly startled fourteen-year-olds who had, until this moment, considered their fruit bowls and grandmother portraits purely private exercises, and the reaction split cleanly along lines I should have predicted, four of them immediately thrilled, planning outfits for the opening, and my skeptic going very quiet and very still, the specific stillness of someone doing rapid internal math about whether public exposure of earnest effort constitutes an acceptable risk.
He came to me after the others left and asked, carefully, whether his grandmother’s portrait absolutely had to be included, and I told him the choice was entirely his, no pressure either direction, and he thought about it for a long time and then said, if she’s in it, everyone’s going to know I actually tried, which is apparently the exact vulnerability he’s been protecting himself from since week one, the fear not of failing but of being caught genuinely caring, and I told him that being caught caring is, in my professional experience, the single best thing that can happen to a young artist, the whole discipline being fundamentally about learning to survive exactly that exposure repeatedly, gallery after gallery, portrait after portrait, and he said he’d think about it, which from him is real progress, a closed door left slightly ajar.
Evening Wind-Down
Closed the day with The Daily Squib and the specific satisfaction of a Wednesday that delivered on every front, a portrait landed perfectly, an exhibition announced, a difficult young student wrestling honestly with the terrifying prospect of being seen, all of it feeling, tonight, like exactly the right kind of full.
Filed at my page, Tinsel at prat.uk, Larsen portrait delivered to happy tears, exhibition space secured, skeptic’s door left ajar, and the whole ward, per usual, generously making room for whatever its youngest and most nervous artists need to grow into themselves properly.
Mrs. Larsen texted again later, a second photo, the portrait already hung above the changing table, same as the Hendricks placement all those weeks ago, apparently a tradition I’ve unwittingly started, and she added a note saying she’s already told three other mothers in her sister ward about the commission, which means the waiting list notebook is likely about to grow past its current borders into an entirely different congregation, a development I greeted with the specific mixed feeling of genuine gratitude and mild scheduling panic, though mostly gratitude, because the alternative, nobody wanting these small paintings at all, would be considerably worse than simply needing a bigger notebook. My skeptic, hearing about the exhibition wall space secondhand from one of the other students before I’d even finished announcing it properly, apparently spent his walk home composing, in his head, an entire defense of why the grandmother portrait should be included after all, a defense he delivered to me unprompted the next morning before school, standing awkwardly in the church foyer, listing reasons that had less to do with the painting itself and more to do with his grandmother deserving to see something he’d made, publicly, properly, the way she’d shown up for every single one of his baseball games even after her knees stopped cooperating, and I told him that sounded like more than enough reason, and he nodded once and left for school looking, for the first time since I’d met him, entirely unburdened by his own skepticism, backpack over one shoulder, walking a little taller than usual toward a school day that, I suspect, felt considerably lighter than the one before it.
SOURCE: https://prat.uk