Things I Learned Painting Faces

Every third weekend in July there is an art fair here in Cadillac. Replete with food, entertainment of all kinds, art ranging from mediocre to spectacular, and fun kid stuff- it is a lovely break in the middle of summer.

Several years ago, my little sister Julie, then just a scrawny teenager, began painting faces for a few bucks a pop. She'd set up a little stand at the art fair, arrange a semi circle of paint pots and glitter applicators, and sit down. The kids would throng the stand, sweaty dollars in hand, and come out decorated with butterflies, cobras, flowers, lightning, lizards, and nearly everything imaginable! I have had the opportunity of helping out on the off-year, making a few bucks while plying the two-dimensional art that I don't often get to.

Its been a while since then- all of us girls have our own kids now. My sis is still thin- but a lovely lady today, the worship leader and a pastor's wife at her growing church. We've missed a few years due to childbearing, work, not being around... but for the most part Julie's been there most every July, painting faces in the hot July sun.

This year I got to help out again. And I learned a few things that I thought I'd share:

1) The most wiggly of children is capable of extreme stillness if they know the payoff is within reach.
I had kids that could not stand still in line, yanking on mom's or grandma's hand while they shimmied and squirmed and knocked my paints over. The minute those kids were in the chair, and received a friendly admonishment to sit still or we couldn't paint their flaming guitar- they were a statue. Some kids try so hard to sit still that their faces scrunch up and they tremble just a bit.

2) This is the closest I will ever get to being Santa or the Easter Bunny.
Seriously, I have never seen kids stand in a boring line for so long other than to sit on Santa's lap! We even had kids stand in the rain! They would wait, studying our sample boards intently, being just about as good as kids can be. Some would wait for well over thirty minutes. I don't think I've ever willingly stood in line for anything for that long, but maybe as a child time meant something different to me...

3) Children are precious.
This is a platitude, I know. I have never been a fan of the mini-human. Sure, I have my own kids, but I have never chosen to be in the company of children- noisy, dirty, irritating little snots that they are. But for some reason I don't feel this way any more. Maybe its maturity, maybe its the simple fact that my own three noisemakers are at Grandpa's this week and I miss them. Or maybe it is just that, in a world full of vileness and apathy and greed and war, there are these tiny spots of innocence where all it really takes to set the world right is a handpainted rainbow (with sparkles, mind you!) on a thin, sticky little arm. Every single child that sat in my painter's chair was a darling capable of melting any hardened heart, if given the chance. There was the young girl who asked me if her painting was 'permnanent', the little boy who wanted a whole-face skull in order to scare his grandparents, the tiny tykes who could barely voice their choice of painting (a cupcake, inevitably), and the very serious little girl who needed to customize every color of her forehead tiara painting.

4) Glitter can cover a multitude of evils.
I have come from an artistic family. My mother is a phenomenal painter, my dad sculpts & draws, my middle sister is a wonderful decorator and has a good eye for color, my youngest sis is an amazing artist, and you regular readers know what I do. So I'm not your average gimpy street fair face painter, with a catalog of one soccer ball, one primary color rainbow, and one unrecognizable puppy. Julie and I have a pretty good repertoire of designs, all using multiple tones, color gradients, and fine detail. However, there is the odd brush stroke that cannot be undone, the line that bent when the arm or cheek moved. There is the lizard leg that went just a tiny bit canterwonky, or the flower petal that reaches out a quarter inch beyond its peers. A good dusting of fine cut iridescent glitter can make it all look better...

5) Our children are becoming normalized to mass production.
Julie and I painted our sample boards ourselves. Although we are the artists on the black canvas boards, and we are the artist on the peanut butter-smudged cheek, there is just not a way, really, to have every five-minute paint job be the exact same. Most kids would pick a painting off the board, then watch us apply it to their arm. Often, a confused look would cross their face when this strand of unicorn hair was longer, curlier, or more aqua than the strand on the board. Very few kids minded, and most were happy to have something unique, for them. But I realize their confusion when I watch a cartoon, or wander a toy aisle. Images of Disney princesses and Bob the Builder pass before my eyes- licensed character that have to look exactly like the next one. Mass conformity is scary. Keep your kids away from it if you can.

6) Incredibly simple things can make a child's day.
As an adult, I have somehow lost my ability to just be delighted. There is always the next thing to get to, a load of dishes to be washed, a bill unpaid, a headache forming just beyond the worries of the day. My favorite paintings to do are face. When you do a kid's arm, they pretty much get to watch it unfold, and are generally happy, but unimpressed with the result. When you do their face, however, they don't know what the heck is going on. They can feel the fine wet bristles tickle their face, they can see Mom's head nod in encouragement, and they can see what shade of yellow I'm using next. But they see the whole work all at once, in a mirror. There is generally the same reaction- an open mouth, glowing eyes, a little gasp. They linger over the mirror, almost touching the still-wet paint, afraid to smudge the little bit of art on their person. It is a moment of sheer delight, and they usually skip away happy. I need to find some things that delight me, and remember to just shove everything else out of my mind and experience that gasp, that uplifting of the shoulder blades, that joy.

I bet you do, too.

Pre-Computer: Art Existed

We moved to Michigan in August, and we have a dozen boxes yet to unpack. Every now and then I make a half-hearted attempt to unpack some, but wind up getting distracted with whatever inane stuff is inside.

Recently, Kid #1 and I were sifting through a box of papers. Not just any papers, these were drawings, sketches, and paintings of mine from time past, some over fourteen years old! Yellowed, crumbling at the edges where acidic tape has eaten into the sides, these trivial works of art represent my growth as a person and an artist.
I've never given them much thought, in fact I have discarded dozens of my works throughout the years. Michael, however, will not allow me to pitch any more art. He feels it is worth much more than the trash bin. So it sits, aging, in an underbed storage bin. So when Kid #1 was leafing through the sheets, I busied myself with organizing screwdrivers.

"Mom!!" Kid yelled, "Who did this drawing? These butterflies?"
"Uh, me. Who else?"
She made a disbelieving tongue-clicking sound and waved the ancient paper in front of me,
"It's so beautiful!" She gushes, "This one butterfly looks like it has all fall colors."
I glance at the drawing in question. Sure enough, it is titled 'Winter, Spring, Summer, Fall'. Four butterflies in various stages of flight, each done in colors of the season- Spring is pastel and light, Winter has gray edges and brown and white accents. I can remember vividly the day that I sketched this, lovingly sharpening my Prismacolor pencils in order to fill in the details better.

That was so long ago that the memories feel like they aren't even mine. I haven't even touched a colored pencil in years, let alone brought beauty like this out of one. What killed that inside of me? What took the art out of my hands, my mind, my soul, and filled the void with angst and frustration?
I used to withdraw into my world of music and art to escape the sorrows of life with my father. I'd lock myself in my room, line up my pencils in a perfect color gradient, turn on the little nail polish-encrusted clock radio by my bed, and draw for hours. I would sketch circles, laying them out in perfect symmetry, disciplining my mind to divide each tiny section of the circle into shards of shape, color, and form. Then I'd fill in each little triangle, each tiny sliver of design, all around the circle. I destroyed most of these after staring at them for a few months, but some of them survived.
I sketched aliens faces, peering out from underbrush with glowing eyes. Butterflies, my sister's feet, desert wrens in our front yard, and more intricate circles took shape under my hand. The art wasn't stellar, but it was good.

So why did I stop? Life came and got it in the way, for one thing. My art took a new direction with my design career, and I learned to put structure to the shapes that I saw in my head. I lost the ability, slowly, to sketch, replacing it with the ability to sculpt. I lost the whirling circle patterns and replaced them with intricate Celtic knot wedding bands- things that our family could sell instead of just things that I could hang on the wall.
I lost the brilliant dance of color in my head, gave away the treasured (and expensive!) Prismacolor set to my little sister, and focused on churning out jewelry for our cases.

Then marriage came along, and with it an introduction to the wonderful world of computers. Kids followed soon after- way too soon after- and my art was lost completely in a world of spit-up and diapers and never-ending bills. I indulged occasionally in something artsy-craftsy: wreaths for my living room wall, flower arrangements to make the house look pretty, window treatments... but the art was always saved for the sculpting table. And even then- more often than not it was within constraints- is it saleable, is it functional, is it doable?
I learned to do a little bit of Photoshop work, and remembered my days of filling in color by hand.
Why, who had to struggle with compass, ruler, protractor, and pencil now? Not when you have mask, shape, copy, paste, transform, flip horizontal!
Why bother carefully outlining a shape with Vert Printemps (the French translations always sounded much more 'arty'), then carefully coloring it in, then going over it once more until the color hazed over, ready for a rubdown with the bottom of my tee-shirt? Not when you have paintbucket!

I buy colored pencils for my kids, but I never just sit still with them and color! There are always so many other things to do- dishes, laundry, bills, this bloody blog, the other bloody blog, yardwork, cooking, Civilization III, and more dishes.

Life has stolen my soul.

Art was my soul's song.

I had that butterfly drawing framed. It hangs in Kid #1's room now, perfect because she is dainty and fragile like a butterfly, and there is a butterfly meaning tied up in her middle name. The framers had to work around the missing patches and masking tape stains, because I never regarded my art enough to preserve it. The huge missing chunk out of the corner serves to remind me of the piece of my spirit that left when I gave away my colors.

I'm going to buy myself another set of colors, as soon as I have the money and I can get to a town that has supplies.

Then, I'm going to pull out the protractor, compass, ruler, pencils, eraser, and paper.
I'm going to draw a huge circle, and it is going to give me my breath back.
I'm going to measure out the center and mark off graduated spaces: one inch, three-quarters of an inch, five eighths... and as I mark these off the years will fall off my shoulders and I'll sit up straight.
I'll begin laying out lines- at hard angles and soft- and my jaw will unclench and maybe the eternal headache will go away.
I'll trace the important lines in marker and erase the dividing lines, and my gray hairs will not show quite so much.
I'll color in the shapes- yellow, spring green, peridot green, leaf green, green, teal, turquoise, blue, violet. I'll use so many gradient colors in between that the rainbow will start to roll off my desk, and I'll stoop to pick them up and maybe find that old nail polish-encrusted clock radio. If I'm lucky enough, it will still be tuned to the oldies station and I'll switch it on and listen to Chantilly Lace and wish that I could have lived in that era. I'll color hard in between the lines, remembering always Mrs. Vandreese telling us to use 'singing colors'... color so hard that the wax in the pencil makes a haze over the top of the green pencil.
Then I'll stoop down and rub, ever so gently, the haze with the bottom of my tee-shirt. The wax will squeak a tiny bit, leave a thin trace on my shirt that will never wash off, but will reveal a vivid, thick layer of color. Color that was put there with a human hand, color that you can dig at with your fingernail.

And when I'm done, I'm going to hang it up on the wall. With proper hardware, soul intact. And then...

I'm going to draw another one.