This past weekend was the Montana Artrepreneur Program (MAP) third weekend training session, and during each day's workshop the attending artists are expected to bring a piece of artwork representative of their work. I brought a pencil sketch for a watercolor portrait I am going to make of an artist who inspires me. Patti Smith embodies everything I love in a creative. She is a poet, a writer, an artist, a philosopher, and a musician.
But the piece I brought in was just my pencil sketch, not a piece of finished art. Just the start of a painting. The pencil sketch of a watercolor is just to inform the artist where to paint. Not in a “paint-by-number” sort of way; good watercolor often ignores the lines' boundaries. Colors mix together on the paper, and pour into each other and into their shadows. The pencil lines are more like a compass, informing of the general direction you are going, but with the knowledge that the real beauty is sometimes found by wandering off the trail. Like a compass, the lines help that the artist never really gets too lost.
And the sketch under a watercolor is simple; Usually faint delicate lines that can either be erased if in error, or will be lost under the later application of pigment. Certainly not the expressive lines of a figure study, or of a graphite or charcoal sketch meant to be a finished piece of art.
But I liked my sketch. I liked it a lot. And I knew I wanted to paint her, this aging gray haired Patti Smith, who to me is more stunning now than the young punk rocker I remember from my youth. I realized I had to sit with it a while before painting away the lines. The landscape of her face, all sharp edges and weathered topography. To me, the sketch is honest, and I’m afraid of losing that honesty under layers of color.
There is this graphite beauty and honesty to everyone. An armature; a true pencil sketch that tells the real story of each of us. Often painted over with layers, obscured by the masks we choose to wear. Or by the filters we choose to look through.
I’ve spent a lot of my life pretending to be something I was not. Stronger, tougher, more capable, less vulnerable, less caring, less feeling. For fear of what? Ridicule? Judgment? Failure? A “game face” if you will, and a game that risked never ending.
And I’ve spent a lot of my life looking at the world through the filters of my own. Judging simply by what I saw, never considering the true story underneath. So fast to judge, so quick to anger, so easy to hate, so reluctant to trust.
But what I see is rarely all there is. There are stories inside of us that we may never completely show, that informs our actions and attitudes. And in others that I will likely never completely see, but are there nevertheless. If I understand that, perhaps I can clear the lens of judgment. I should strive to be strong enough to show more of my real self, my own inner armature. And understand that it is a gift of incredible magnitude when I am fortunate enough to be invited to see that inner sketch of others in my life.
But knowing what is there is far less important than knowing that it is there.
I like my sketch of Patti, but I’ll sit with it for a while. Once I paint it over, it will be gone. But I know that no matter how it turns out, there is something that I think is quite remarkable under the surface.
