Hidden Talent

Every time I sit down to write here, a squat little box nudges my left foot on the floor underneath my desk.  It’s a clear plastic contraption with a poppable black lid that stores some pink ribbon leftover from our wedding last year as well as some black ink accompanying flowery stamps for my homemade thank you notes.  But mostly my little box contains materials for a hobby that I gave up a long time ago: drawing.

Growing up, I always considered myself a fairly artsy person.  I didn’t wear wispy scarves or sketch Looney Tunes characters on my notebooks at school, but I loved a good art class.  Perhaps I felt artsy because of some innate talent of mine, but I mostly liked art because my dad is a well-known art teacher in town.  In the sixth grade when I raised my hand to answer a question about the primary colors, my Language Arts teacher preempted my response with “Yes, Anne, daughter of an art teacher!”  Ever the Daddy’s Girl, I was - and still am -  happy to be defined by his legacy.  

The first time I created a piece of art that one might actually call “good” was in the 8th grade.  I painted a bucolic scene of an old homestead with an aging wood fence in the foreground holding in rows of summer corn, and a bright red barn peppering the hunter green forestline in the distance.  ‘Twas pretty darn good for a thirteen-year old, ifIdosaysomyself.  

I went on to take four drawing classes my freshman and sophomore years of high school.  That’s when art classes really took a turn from producing things you take home to mom to producing things you take to the frame store to get measured for long-term preservation.  I learned how to sketch with colored pencils, how to paint with watercolors, and how to not smudge charcoal drawings.  I learned about negative and positive space and shading in complimentary colors.  

I also learned about the lows and highs of art class: the lows were the time crunches to get a piece done at the end of the semester.  You can cram for an exam, but there’s no faking pencil strokes and shoddy shading techniques.  The highs were the classes themselves.  90-minutes of right-brain meditation in artistic beauty in the midst of a day of left-brain exercises in geometry and history memorization.  The only sounds in class were soothing music playing by the teacher’s desk and the symphony of twenty graphite pencils rubbing against crisp white paper.  I loved it.

But after 10th grade, I never took a drawing class again.

Busy with standardized tests, extracurricular leadership, and college applications, I abandoned art to focus on “my future” in high school.  My quest for a lucrative future sucked up some of my other hobbies / talents in college as well, and once again in a nine-to-five office job.  I naively thought there wasn’t any room for my sketchbooks or my viola in my college backpack or in my briefcase.  So I tucked my art materials away in a plastic box, and they’ve followed me from dorm rooms to apartments just asking to be played with like Woody the Cowboy in Toy Story.    

Now over a decade has passed since my last drawing class and since I last seriously sketched anything.  Having been known as an artsy girl for the first half of my life, now many of my closest friends and family - my best friends from college, my inlaws, even my husband - have never seen a HB pencil in my hand.

Leave it to my loving parents to remind me that I used to like drawing.  My mom casually reminded me of my former hobby a few weeks ago, and by last week, when Ian and I were getting ready to go to South Carolina for the weekend, that little plastic box under the desk was shouting out to me like the Tell-Tale Heart in the floorboard.  So I opened it and pushed the ribbons and stamps aside to pull out an old sketchbook that still had “Period 7” written on the front.   I flipped through some of my old sketches - an unfinished bucket of fall apples, an ocean scene in Myrtle Beach, even a richly colored drawing of a popular movie poster from my sophomore year of high school: Moulin Rouge.  With several blank pages left, all ripe for drawing, I took the sketchbook, a handful of my graphite pencils, and a Restoration Hardware catalogue for source material - and packed them away for the weekend.

So this past Sunday, while Ian enjoyed one of his favorite hobbies - watching football - I rebirthed one of mine.   It's certainly not an A+ piece, but now I know that doesn't matter.

It surprised me how quickly I remembered my drawing techniques.  I had forgotten whether the 4H pencil is darker than the 6H pencil, but I remembered how use the straight edge of the pencil to line up the angles and how to rub the graphite with my thumb to blend the pencil strokes.  Maybe I remembered quickly because of the muscle memory from my hands, but I know that most of those memories came from my heart.