it wasn't great by any means, but it was perfect

            A couple of years ago, I took a painting class at the Pittsburgh Center for the Arts.  I had always enjoyed making art, but got away from my creative side in high school while I focused on math and science classes.  I liked getting absorbed in complex problems to which I could find a definite solution.  Math and science just made sense to me.  If I followed the rules, I was rewarded by an answer that made perfect sense.

            After a couple years in college, I wandered into an art supply store on South Craig Street.  I didn’t really have anything in mind; I just felt the need to create something from within myself.  I bought a canvas, a couple brushes, and a few tubes of paint.  In my shared apartment, I spread newspaper over the coffee table, put some water in a cup, and arranged my new supplies. 

            For two hours, I furiously brushed paint across the canvas.  I had nothing resembling practiced technique; I just let it all flow without judgment.  The resulting painting was something of a self-portrait, I suppose.  I never actually gave it that label until now.  It was a rough portrait of a woman with wild hair blowing around her face with a dark orange background.  Her eyes were mine, though.  And her slightly pained  expression—of confusion or loss of control—was mine when I painted it.  When I finished, I was pleased with the image.  It wasn’t great, by any means, but it was perfect.  It was the first time I really got a glimpse of what had been trapped inside since Hurricane Katrina—frustration, hopelessness, guilt, sadness, maybe even some anger.

            After graduation, I still had a lot of feelings I needed to access and the only way I could think to do so was through painting.  I had kept painting occasionally, picking up a brush every few months, but I never continuously experimented and practiced with the art form.  So, I thought a painting class would be a good way to add some technique and structure to my need for art.

            Everyone in my class was nice, but not overfriendly, and my teacher was very talented and kind.  However, I found it incredibly stressful to test different techniques in class each week with ten other students at easels on either side of my own.  I couldn’t help but peek at their progress and compare it to my own.  Usually, I concluded that mine looked much worse than theirs, and I judge and criticize until I just stopped and stared at the few strokes I had made while everyone else continued. 

            I worked better in my apartment, while my roommate was away or at least in another room.  I turned on soothing music, poured myself a glass of wine, and tried to follow the instructions for that week’s assignment.  One week the homework was to make a black-and-white still life—so I painted a cup I had borrowed from work.  Another week we had to coat the canvas with a layer of paint, wipe a bit off, and then shade in the clean parts.  I never got the hang of this technique.  Everything I did was ugly and lopsided, which was completely unacceptable to me.  Later, we made landscapes and the teacher declared that this was my calling.  I captured the sun shining through a forest of bare trees, the ground covered in snow.  I styled it off of a photograph I had taken the day my grandmother died the previous year. 

            Finally, we were told to create a self-portrait so I started painting my face in class.  I was going to have my hair blowing around with a bird flying out of it, completely free.  When I tried to continue it at home, I couldn’t even look at what was to become an image of my face without feeling anxious.  This was never going to work.  I stared into the small bathroom mirror, looking at myself from different angles and blocking bits of my face.  When I covered up the bottom half of my face, I knew that was the only way I could paint a self-portrait.

            My eyes stare straight forward, expressionless, with my hair hanging down on either side of my face.  Entangled in my hair are the roots of a small tree, its leaves just budding in the springtime.  I have been obsessed by that image—a tree in the springtime—for many years, now.  It’s even tattooed on my right side.  To me, it represents new life, hope, dreams, strength, stability…everything that I’ve been searching for since August 29, 2005.  I may not be a great painter, but it allows me to express emotions that I am unable to put into words.  That's what counts.

a whole bunch of other emotions

            Two-thousand-and-five was not a great year.  In my opinion, this is an understatement.  It’s like saying that Albert Einstein was kind of smart.

            I graduated from high school on a warm, clear summer day in June, accepting my diploma on the football field with my 185 classmates.  The world was my oyster, its fresh buttered flesh almost melting in my mouth.  I was free of high school and the small sheltered town where I grew up.  College was my next move and the possibilities after that were endless.  I was smart, I was driven; I could do anything I put my mind to.

            Shortly after graduation, my family relocated from northeastern Ohio to Mississippi’s Gulf Coast.  My dad was offered a great job and quite frankly, we all needed a change.  But I wasn’t quite ready for that change just yet.  I felt more like an adult after I finished high school and I wanted to have some fun with my friends.  So I stayed behind for a month.  My friends and I didn’t do anything in particular, but it was one last hoorah, no matter how small it was.

            In August, my sister, older by four years, left for Panama “to make real differences in the lives of real people” with the Peace Corps.  To me, she had always seemed so sure of herself, independent and driven.  I admired her and wanted to follow her example.  I even joined the high school swim team for one stressful season because she had swam on the team when she was in high school.   She had gone to the University of Toronto for college, so I turned in an application, too.  We all wished her the best of luck with as much love as we could give her and drove home from the airport with tears in our eyes.

            Shortly after my sister left, my parents and I piled into the car and headed back north.  I was headed to the University of Pittsburgh.  I was excited and nervous and a whole bunch of other emotions that I didn’t know how to identify.  I remember the total chaos around the dorms—where to get your key, your ID card, information packets, and all.  People were wandering around like a bunch of hungry cats herded by some incompetent wrangler.  Then we stood in line, hot and sweaty with countless other hot, sweaty families, waiting for the elevators to take us up to my floor.

            I wandered into my room, small, cramped, pie-shaped.  My roommate was already getting settled in.  She was a year younger, having graduated high school early, and clearly thought a lot of herself.  Great.  This will be a blast.  But we smiled and chatted and made the best of the situation.  What else could we do?  We were all a bunch of kids being squeezed into dorms about to start what were the so-called, “best years of our lives.”

            A few days later, Hurricane Katrina slammed the Gulf Coast of Mississippi and Louisiana.  I had no real friends at college; I had just started to meet everyone.  I mean, I had just gotten to college.  Any calls I placed to my parents couldn’t get through.  I didn’t know where they were, if they were okay, if they were alive.  News footage of the disaster bombarded me from every side—it was the only thing on the televisions around campus.  And my sister was in Panama.  I felt completely helpless.  Powerless.  Alone.