I don't speak enough Spanish to have a conversation, so, please, don't test me on it!
Four years ago, with the help of my fiance' - now husband- I decided to pursue my passion - painting. Well, I took the long way around to get to it, but I'm out of the closet now. I like to paint. I want to paint and I need to paint. Four years ago, I said I wanted to go back to school to pursue a degree in graphic design. It was a ruse. I was fooling myself and everybody else. Graphic designers have "real jobs" and one only goes to school to be trained for real jobs, right?
So, I began taking my "graphic design" classes at my local community college. Fortunately, one of them was drawing and fortunately I got a REAL teacher. One who insisted I learn to see shape and value. One who liked to yell about "gestalt" and chanted idioms incessantly, "Where one plane comes in front of the other, you need to lower the key and feather the edge!" Only one drawing class was required for an associate's degree in graphic design, but I took another and another. I took life drawing classes and a painting class from the same teacher. I took his portrait painting class in the summer. "You don't paint eyes, noses and mouths! You paint planes!" "A red dress is still red in the dark!" I cried everyday it was so hard, but I loved it. So, the next semester, another painting class.
"I'm not going to be a graphic designer," I told my husband. "I'll teach," I said. "I'll be a high school teacher." My mother laughed. "You? A teacher?" I thought if I said I wanted to be an art teacher, I could keep going to school, keep learning. So, after my beloved, crotchety and very loud and very honest, Dr. Hillis retired from the community college, I transfered to the university. "Don't go for a teaching degree," Dr. Hillis said. I didn't, but I didn't tell anybody about it. How could I tell anybody I was majoring in "painting?"
They don't teach you how to paint at the university. I don't know, if they do at other universities, but at mine, they teach you how to talk about painting. We sat for long hours critiqueing work that had never been worked on, only mushed around and muddied up. Work that pretended to be painting but was something altogether different. I got confused. What is this? I'm in the twilight zone. The emperor is naked and nobody notices. Many of these people are graduating. Four years of university training and they have so little to show for it. My own painting began to stagnate. The bar was too low. I wasn't progressing. I was depressed. I quit the university after a year and several thousand dollars. Now, here I am. My husband and my family know I am not a high school teacher, or a graphic designer. I am an artist. That's all. They always knew, even though I was afraid to tell them. Why, I don't know. (Well, I do know. I spent 10 years as a mortgage loan officer. When I realized I was living somebody else's life, business was really starting to boom. Taking off those golden handcuffs was hard. I thought I needed to justify it.)
I have so much to learn. I spent so many years of my life just trying to survive - trying to make money. I have so much catching up to do. I will be reading and painting for a while. Then I will show you something. The bar is so high here I will never reach it. I like it like that.
www.kimberscott.com
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