It’s New Year’s Eve and I’m in Sorrento, sitting in a bar at the edge of a big group, and I’m drawing. I’m drawing like some people smoke – moving my hands to match the movements of my thoughts and my nods. I’m not talking much, because my Italian is tired, and even my English, and it’s easier to outline shadows with my pencil than sentences with my mouth. I want to listen to the space as well as the conversation, to see the way the walls are jointed and the light falls and the objects move and capture on my page not the way that it looks but the way that it feels.
This is what I’ve realized about drawing, and about writing, and any way I might combine them, after years of searching for my creative path – it’s not about what things look like exactly, it’s about the way they feel to me. Although this perspective might have felt self-centered to me a decade ago, when I was wading through a conceptual art degree, resisting with all my might a world where it seemed like success required selling self-involvedness, I’ve now seen a different facet. There is no one reality to be expressed – there are thousands. I try like Thoreau to be transparent, but my eye will always be filtered through my style. I wish I’d known years ago that style is just what happens when you just keep creating in every situation and as every version of yourself, reach your superficial goals so that you stop feeling like you need to prove anything, and see what remains consistent.
Someone once told me a superstition: that the way you spend your New Year’s Eve will predict your coming year. In Sorrento, as I always do, I’m thinking about this, and wondering, will this year be the year that things happen? That I create stronger creative habits and vanquish my fear of sharing, that I publish something? That I start introducing myself first as an illustrator before admitting I’m a part-time barista? This year, I’ve been exploring, seeing, speaking, thinking, and in this moment my hands are doing what I want to do with that. I just need to keep letting them do it.
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It’s February of this next year, and I’m in the house where I grew up. Half of the amaryllises are blooming over the wood stove, which had been used once in the snow storm last week. Probably the heat triggered the blossoms, but it could also be this week’s sudden sun and sixteen degrees of warmth pouring through the skylights. Jet lag has me awake early enough to see gold just at the tops of the pines outside, before it begins to chase blue shadows down the trunks.
The amaryllises only bloom once a year, and I only visit once a year. I’ve been thinking all week about drawing them. I trace their grand stems with my eyes, the red petals like curled fingers at the edge of a dance, the pleated arcs of the leaves heavy like cast wax. As is often the case when I see something beautiful and have time to sketch it, I do not touch my pencil. But here, I have also been haunted by the old old pictures of mine hanging here, for which I was told I had promise, which I took as a promise. I have been thinking of other things.
Home is just the first step of a very long trip. I quit my barista job, and now I can only introduce myself as an illustrator. I have a backpack, a thin book in which I write, and one in which I draw. Probably I will do both in both. I have a flight booked that will take me another third of the way around the world, to a place where no old pictures of mine hang.
Eventually, I see that the tips of the grand amaryllis blossoms are beginning to darken, and then they begin to shrivel into ringlets. One grand stem leans. I decide to draw it before it starts to droop. And later, the golden square of skylight highlights the blossoms on the other side, and as one plant wilts another blooms, and I have to draw it too.
persimmoness 