How to Paint: Lesson One

If I'm gonna do this painting thing, then I'm gonna do it for mastery, not to pass the time because I got nothing better to do.  That sounds like a bold statement for somebody who quit doing it for almost thirty years and was only moderately talented to begin with.  All that's true, but I'm just that kind of an asshole.

I have weird ideas about art.  They're similar to my weird ideas about religion.  Both involve chasing something you can't ever touch and most never catch even a glimpse of.  Beauty is a fundamental force of the universe, both creating and destroying; it is a principal motivator in whatever game God plays.  It's a principal element in what drives him to create, essentially us, as well as everything else, but then also to destroy the same so that its fleeting temporal nature magnifies the intensity of its value.  That its overwhelming power can exist only in the liquid nature of time encourages us to persevere, even though we are meek and puny in the face of beauty.    

Because art and beauty have no structure or definition, I figure if I go about it also without structure and definition, then I'll just get lost and confused and probably drink myself to death like Hemmingway.  Just kidding about that, although losing his path really is how Papa died.  Watercolor is a new medium for me.  That's good, though.  That means I can't use shit I learned when I was sixteen as a crutch.  I have to learn all new disciplines, all new methods, and perspectives.  Since I'm moving into the second half of a centenarian life, I have to be mindful of constantly learning new things to keep my mind exercised to prevent its decline.  I've seen what happens when it declines, and I don't want that.  Since music, dance, and science seem out of the question, art must be the way to go.  I'm not spending the rest of my life learning new words for scrabble.

All of that unnecessary verbiage aside, here's the plan:  five new watercolor paintings a week.  They may be exercises, or they may be an attempt at finished pieces, but there must be five of them, at least nine by twelve inches in size.  Because all my research so far says that drawing is a key element of watercolor, then I'll need to do at least five drawings a week, separate from the painting, although they can be used to prepare myself for a painting.  Draw it once as a drawing, draw it again as the underpinning of a painting, like so.  That's a total of ten hours a week working on this project.  That's nothing.  I used to spend twenty-five hours a week sitting on my ass at scrooges.  This is a lot more productive and a lot less likely to lead me into chatting up a woman who might ruin my life.  The food won't be as good, though, and sometimes I really miss whiskey and tobacco.  There may be weeks when I do ten paintings, but there have to be at least five.  It's too easy to "think about" painting without actually doing it.  I did that for longer than some of you have been alive.  

None of this is to say I will be any good.  None of my efforts to paint or write or draw or sculpt or act is to "be good" or seek approval; it's about whatever that's inside me needs coming out, and it won't leave me alone unless I let it.  There were times in my life when I would do these things and not tell anyone, not my wife, not my mother, not my father; it's not about that.  What's different now is that I've found that it's actually kind of nice if I share what I'm doing.  Sharing is good like Mrs. Nelson said.  Naps are good too, but I've napped too long.  It's time for work.

Lessons of the Cross

 

Despite what the Beatles tell you, the amount of love you give does not equal the amount of love you take. In many lives, the amount of love you put into the world greatly out measures the amount of love the world returns to you by the final act. They know this, but they move forward despite it, because they know a secret.

You must go, fearless, into the abyss of this inequity because if you do not, there is no life at all. Most of the people who know this terrible secret never mention it. They serve, they love, they suffer, they die, and they do it for you. That is the lesson of the Christ.

I'm not Jesus. I cannot promise you love and life and redemption eternal because, unlike Jesus, I have not seen it. For all I know, it could be a myth created to make us feel better.

What I do know is this: if you falter, if you fail, if you do not make your proper contribution to this cycle of declivity and suffering, then those who come after you will have even less love, less opportunity, less hope, than you had. Only through your sacrifice is their redemption possible. That is the lesson of the cross. Turn away if you must, but the price of your absence will be paid not by you but by those who come after.

Journeys of Faith

The Christian apologists I depend on the most are Spong and Lewis (C.S., not T.W., although T.W. is way up there). There are oceans between their perspectives, but I believe Christology is that deep and varied if you give it a chance.

The question every Christian must answer is "do you believe?" and I never know how to answer that. I do not have child-like faith, but I didn't have it as a child, either. I was, and am, a very nervous and frightened child. That makes it very difficult to have a complete and blinding faith in anything or anyone.

There was a time when I chose to disavow all childhood instruction and memes and tribal fielty with regards to Christianity and start over, to rebuild my faith on my own terms as an adult. Begining from a position of no belief, I rebuilt the foundations of my faith, brick by brick to discover what I really felt and what I could really present as my own life.

In my journey to rebuild my faith, I included two atheists, Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchins. I didn't think I could make an honest conclusion without considering all sides of the issue, and for people without faith, these two are among the best. 

Dawkins' ideas about memes actually provided me the building blocks of my new faith. Combining Dawkin's theories about memes with Jung's theories about archetypes allowed me to hypothesize that maybe this is the language by which the divine communicates with us, and that's why these memes and archetypes repeat themselves in nearly every culture. It's a way to deliver these gigantic ideas to us in smaller, digestible pieces.

Faith is a journey, not a destination, and it's a journey we make every moment of our entire lives; even if we tell ourselves our minds and our hearts are settled on the subject, they never really are. Lewis is somebody you might think had a settled and firm faith, but if you read A Grief Observed, written after the death of his wife, Joy, you'll see that even Lewis had an evolving and changing faith and faced days when the well seemed dry and unrecoverable.

I start essays like this thinking by the end, I'll come up with some sort of constructed and complete point, but on this particular subject, I never do. Maybe there is no focused point in faith. Maybe there's not meant to be. Maybe we're not able to complete this mind journey while we're alive. Maybe that was the point all along.  

Tellers of Stories

Besides girls with brown eyes and good coffee, there's not much in the world I love as much as a good story, especially if it's a story about Mississippi.   My life has been blessed in so many ways.  That I've been surrounded by so many, more than excellent, raconteurs means more to me than I can say.  

Telling stories runs in my family.  Besides basic communication and fellowship, telling stories is the foundation of good writing.  Both my nephews are excellent writers.  I knew Jack was and suspected Campbell might be.  I read over some of Campbell's master's thesis on Christmas, and he's a fantastic writer.  I haven't read anything Collins wrote yet.  She's pretty young but the quickest of the three and fierce like a lion, so I don't see how she could be anything but an excellent writer.  Their mom tells great stories.  She favors our mom, who could hold her own among all the men around her who thought they knew better.  

Of all the boys my baby sister brought home, she married the one that told the best stories.  I don't know if that was part of her criteria, but it was a big part of mine.  There was this one fella called the Prince of Darkness, who apparently could sneak across enemy lines with nothing but a pen knife and take out a platoon, but he couldn't tell a story worth a damn.  He couldn't tell stories, but there are some pretty good stories about him, though.  Ask me about the alligators or the fight at CS's sometimes.  

I don't know if it was his intention, but Jay collected a remarkable group of storytellers around him through the years, which surprised the hell out of me, seeing as two-thirds of them are Phi Delta Thetas.  Bowman's really good, but the king will always be Hank Aiken.  I think the key is that they're all very active readers, and for whatever else is going on up there, Oxford has an excellent culture for reading and writing.  Square Books is a big part of that; the bar at City Grocery has a reputation for wetting some excellent writers, most notably Larry Brown.  I wasn't there, but the people who know tell me that Barry Hannah is probably the most responsible for the literary culture at Ole Miss.  It's not so much that he was an amazing writer himself, which he was, but that he promoted and mentored and made welcome so many other writers, creating a seed and a tree that still bears fruit up in Oxford town.

I never knew my great-grandfather.  He seemed to have been excellent with his hands, having built a schoolhouse and a store and used his ox team to plow most of the roads up in Atalla County in that time.   "Good with his hands" is an accurate way to describe my Great-grand, who everyone called Cap, but an interesting choice of words, seeing as, of hands, he had only one, losing the other in an accident as a young man.  Whatever else Cap did in life, he must have been an excellent storyteller because his children were and their children were.

One of the great pleasures of my young life was shadowing my father when he was with his cousins and friends, so much so that I learned to carry things and mix drinks and light cigarettes in hopes that I'd be useful enough that they'd tolerate my presence.  It's not that they were captains of industry, marshals of law, or bulwarks of Mississippi politics; (although they were); they fascinated me because of the stories they told, mostly about each other, but also about the life and conditions and events and passions that make up Mississippi.

Dad had a cousin on his mom's side, Ben McCarty, and a cousin on his dad's side, Robert Wingate, who both told excellent stories, some of the best.  There was a fraternity of men around my dad who all looked into their glass and swirled the ice as they told stories like it was a scrying glass that showed them the past.  Dad did it too.  Smoking and drinking, especially to excess, was part of the culture of men in their generation.  It probably contributed to why there are so few of them left, but it made them all excellent at gesturing while they talked, and they talked a lot.  

Daddy idolized his older cousin Robert Wingate, and I did too.  Robert was the keep of the family legends for many years.  Besides Wingate, Dad's best friend was Rowan Taylor.   Rowan had an excellent mind, one of the best I've known.  He was an avid reader and often found ways to introduce himself to and associate himself with the many excellent writers in Mississippi.  I'm sure he knew her before, but through his beloved Suzanna Marrs, he was able to befriend Eudora Welty in the last years of her life.  Miss Eudora was selective about her companions.  That she allowed him was something of an honor.  In conversation and as a storyteller, Rowan practiced a very precise sort of conservation of words that made him seem stoic to some but, to me, made him seem more interesting than the others.  I always found his choice and economy of words as interesting as whatever story he told.  Like Miss Eudora, Rowan was a life trustee of Millsaps, which benefited us in many ways.  

For several reasons, reading and writing were difficult for me, but befriending and knowing and loving these amazing people made a shy boy like me, whose eyes didn't work properly, want to read and want to write and want to tell stories.  It's the wanting to that makes us all capable of doing the worthwhile things in life, no matter how difficult they are for us.  Some of them are lost to us now, but their voices, their ideas, and their stories are, and will always be, a part of me.