Don't know if I've ever mentioned that, but maybe that's because painting is something I rarely talk about ... now.
I used to talk a lot about my painting. I didn't paint nearly as much as I talked about painting, and I wound up having something like writer's block for painting for ... hmm ... oh, eight years.
I was in Provincetown, where most folks go to inspire their artistic selves. I lived there for six months. This was going back a spell to 1992, when I was just a cute little thing.
Hmm. Well, I was actually still a bad-ass New Yorker with a chip on my shoulder the size of Pittsburgh, but I was, (and incidentally, still am) quite cute.
Anyway, there I was in this dinky hell-hole of a bungalow with exposed insulation and a shower in the kitchen, painting away at a self-portrait.
The more I painted, the uglier I got. By the time I threw the portrait aside, I felt like I was stuck in some sick rendition of Dorian Gray.
I decided to take a break from painting and write for a while, and then, overnight, eight years went by.
All the friends and lovers who met me from 1992 until the magical year 2000 didn't even know I painted. Or they knew it like some little hobby I'd cast aside in my formative years.
I kept my old work hidden in the closet, my dirty little secret, this decrepit skeleton covered up in garbage bags and bubble-wrap. I didn't like who I was in the years I painted, my teens through my late 20s.
Well, to tell you the truth, I've only recently started thinking I'm pretty great. It's a new thing -- knowing I'm kinda cool. I think I'll keep thinking this way. It sure beats the alternative.
Anyway, in the fall of 2000, while I was licking my wounds over a marathon of painful break-ups and what felt like mental menopause, I just started to paint.
I didn't announce it. I didn't talk too much about it. I just started to paint.
And I (knock on every imaginable kind of wood) haven't stopped and hope I never will.
I don't think I ever really was an artist. All those years when I dedicated myself fully to my work and talked about little else and pounded the pavement trying to get someone to look at my slides and show my work to little avail ... I don't think I really was an artist.
I know this, because I cared far more about what people thought about my work than about the process of creating that work. I used to rush madly through the painting process, hungry for the end when I would have something that someone might admire, or better yet hoping that someone might admire me.
That's not what it's all about; I know that now.
I might never sell a painting in my lifetime. I might sell a thousand. I might never achieve any kind of recognition for this facet of my life.
I might become well known as a painter, (or more likely a painter/chef/writer/lunatic who can't decide who and what she is).
But I love the process.
It's not always fun, painting. Sometimes it's terrifying, like recently when I started painting the World Trade Center, the firefighters and my many demons brewing since September 11th.
Putting these things on paper was far easier than putting them on canvas. Putting them on canvas gave them a face. It made them real. I can touch them now. They hang on my walls to remind me that these things did, in fact happen.
I'm not an artist.
I paint.
I'm not a writer, but I do write.
Please, oh please, let me keep on loving the process.
It feels a little bit like flying.
