Yesterday, I posted a plea for artists to help me learn about visual art. I asked art men and women to help me be less of a moron when thinking about going to a gallery or a museum. The response to my request was immediate and copious. I'm overwhelmed by the generous sharing of ideas and advice local artists have already given me. I want to begin saying thanks to the dozens of men and women with paint stains on their shirts, camera strapped around their necks, and clay stuck to their foreheads who have come forth to help me with my art education. I'll be starting soon when I work out scheduling details with these artist folks.
But today I thought I would write about something that might help to explain my sudden desire to become more well versed in the visual arts. My shame. My derailed interest in art. My squandered youth.
Though I am now something of a dullard when it comes to looking at or talking about visual art, I was once something of a prodigy. In my boyhood days I excelled as an art student. In grade school, Vernon Kemp saw that I was handy with a paint brush and knew my way around a grease pencil as a grade schooler at Roosevelt Elementary School. Bill Brueske, my junior high school art teacher, took a shine to me and made me one of his three "special students." This meant we worked alone on advanced projects while our peers drew bowls of fruit. I remember a bath tub full of wood pieces that I was trying to bend for a sculpture I was working on with my fellow advanced art pals, such was the heady stuff we were working on. I was such a fine visual artist that my own mother grafted some of my artwork and submitted it as her own for a university class she was taking when I was a high school student.
What happened? Why did the art train come off the track so hard? Why am I embarrassed to even begin to write about visual art on this self proclaimed blog about "art for everyday people?"
It was that nasty bitch's fault. You know her. The theatre. She is to blame for my stunted attempt to be the next Julian Schnabel (we have the same girlish frame and ability to grow forest thick beards, you know).
Around the time pencil sets and easels became less important to me than girls and being the life of the party, I discovered the narcotic called the theater. As a teenager I struggled like all kids do to find my place. I had my share of friends as a kid, but I still remember the numbing pain of wanting to be a truly special part of any group but not having the language to do it. Then as I entered the seventh grade, I did perhaps the bravest thing I have ever done in my life. I tried out for a play. I think I threw my parents for a loop because I was prior to my entrance into the theater world in a spectacular musical theatre extravaganza called "Take Me Back To Manhattan", a shy enough kid who was quiet, reserved and compliant. I was a teacher's dream in class because I did my work and didn't talk back. But the theater changed all that.
The theater allowed me to become the big mouth I longed to be. It gave me the ability to have opinions, to embrace challenge and to buck convention. I no longer had to create my own language. I was handed a rosetta stone on how to be cool, engaging, and funny with every new script I would absorb. Incrementally my life on-stage morphed into my life off stage and I became what I had always hoped to become: a memorable personality.
But in the past week or so, something snapped in my head. I have become a creature of the theater. I don't really know how to do anything else. This is not to say that I have lost my love for the theater and my place in it. Au contraire. I adore the theater. Simply love it. But I want to expand my life experience as I approach middle age. I want to recapture the spark of youth associated with my long ago passionate dalliance with visual art that I somehow recalled the other day when doing an art project with my children. I want to once again possess the eyes for art that my ten-year-old self once had. I want to learn again how to appreciate art as a wonderful expression of the soul and mind that manifests itself in something hanging on a wall, sitting on a plaza, or taking up place on a mantle. And I want to be able to talk about it with other people in a manner that makes me happy.
I don't need to become a turtle neck wearing art critic. Actually, I would hate that. I just want to be able to talk about art like I talk about theater, food, my kids, my wife, THE WIRE, Facebook and the card game Quiddler: with great love and enthusiasm. I know that art is important, but today I don't really know why. I once did, and hanging with artists is my path towards recharging my art appreciation batteries.
I may have become one of "the play gays" and drifted away from my love of art, but I know that had I been able to throw a perfect spiral and become the captain of the football team, I would be writing a similar story. This is my story of wanting to reconnect to something memorable and life affirming from my youth. You may have your own, and I would love to hear it. I would love to have many travelers with me on my art education journey. If you want to ride the bus with me, by all means let me know and I'll make room for you. There seems to be a huge network of generous spirits willing to help me make this passage, and I'm already grateful to the artists and educators who have come forth to say, "we'll help you be a boy once again."
And if there's anyone out there willing to show me how to throw a perfect spiral, I'm open to a little training camp. The regrets and desires of approaching middle age weigh heavy on my mind these days.
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