He wanted to play a song for us, but first he told us to get out of the room.
I was visiting a friend in Austin, TX. Her 5 year old son–as passionate, brilliant, and tempestuous as any 5 year-old I’ve ever met–had seized on her red guitar. He’d seen her start to play it as he emerged from his bedroom, and immediately wanted to play himself. So he sat in an armchair and told us to get out of the room as my friend set the guitar–bigger than he was–on his lap. He plucked at the strings as best he could, his little fingers sounding out notes by intuition, as my friend and I listened from the hallway. We’d clap when he was done, but we were not allowed to look at him.
All at once I found myself flashing back to the first time I’d played piano. I was her son’s age, or younger, visiting my grandma. She had an old upright piano in her living room, a well-loved piece of equipment that few people in my family could actually play. One of my earliest memories is of sitting on the piano bench, feeling the keys with my fingers, colliding notes much as my friend’s son would do almost thirty years later–not attempting to make anything like a “song” or even a melody. Rather, I’d play a note, and then another note, and if the crash of the notes together awakened something in me I’d try to recreate it, then again, and then again, until I got bored and started to feel around for some other collision of notes that would excite me. Then, when I found something I really like, I’d call for my grandma in the other room. I wanted her to hear what I’d done, I wanted her approval, but as with my friend’s son she was not to actually watch me do it.
Performer’s Jitters
Almost everyone who has to suddenly shift to making art in the privacy of one’s own studio to producing art IN FRONT OF other people will probably understand the petulance of these two children. There is something that happens when other people enter our creative space. Words that once came easily to us suddenly fly out the window. Long-practiced movements become clunky. The freedom and sense of power we had when we were alone is replaced by insecurity, and if our eyes dare to look out to the crowd, even friendly eyes can suddenly appear distant and judgmental.
This is especially prominent in music, a medium which lends itself naturally to performance, and where our efforts often fall short of the digitally-enhanced perfection we hear on the radio, and in our headphones. Years after my first encounter with piano, I would agonize in khaki pants and long-sleeve button down shirts when I would have to do a piano recital. In a church or nursing home, with all my teacher’s other students, I’d fidget in my seat and wait my turn. I envied the younger kids their easier pieces, and the older kids their seemingly impossible talent. Every step to the stage felt like an eternity. The piano itself seemed hostile to my intention. Why oh why hadn’t I practiced more, I pleaded with myself. When I played, my fingers would jump disobediently, discovering new ways to make mistakes as I’d start to sweat in my “church clothes.” I was sure that the audience was bored, or even annoyed, that they had to hear such a wretched performance. When it was over I scurried back to my seat, sure that the applause was merely polite and not something to take encouragement from.
Present Day: Whiteboard Drawing at the Cortland Illinois Lions Club
Fast forward to the present day. Less than 2 weeks after my friend’s son played us his budding masterpiece I found myself in front of a crowd at the Cortland, IL Lions Club. A group of young kids sat at a long table, watching me as I talked about INSPIRATION and the power of eyes to express emotion in comics.
But merely talking about art isn’t enough. There are many good lecturers out there talking about art, about its history or the technical act of its creation. We at Do Art Productions, though, want to capture art as it’s being created, to encourage participants to get their hands dirty and engage with the process of making art. But in order to accomplish this I need to sacrifice my own insecurities as I face the crowd. I can see their minds begin to wander behind their eyes–little kids here on a dreary autumn afternoon. I introduce myself, and begin to draw.
What changed? How is it that that shy kid, the kid who once urged people out of eyeline before he’d so much as play the piano is now actively inviting scrutiny from brutally honest children? Anybody who finds themselves suddenly swimming in adulthood will understand that, somewhere between the first stirrings of puberty and the whirlwind of late adolescence, our sense of awkwardness relaxes. It does this organically, almost insensibly, and so of course it does little good trying to explain it to kids at any age, who are caught up in the maelstroms of their own lives.
But it also comes from that dreaded word above, from practice. When I was young I hated practice, fought my parents over every moment practicing the piano as though it were an excruciating chore. Years of doing art, taking up the practice of writing and drawing as ends in themselves, has made it so I look forward to time spent drawing on the whiteboard, ironing out my mistakes before others can see them. Years of forging habits the hard way, through setbacks and momentary lapses in willpower, have made it so that I can retreat every late afternoon, to drawing and making comics, almost automatically. And years of watching my hands and my brain improve at drawing has reassured me that this practice is not wasted, that it will lead to progress that, when I look back on it, will be proof of the splendid power of the human mind (not just mine–ANYBODY’S!) to conquer seemingly insurmountable obstacles, and bring one’s own version of beauty into the world.
What Else, Dear Artists, Can We Draw Together?
As I turn an ordinary picture of SpongeBob into the “wackiest version of SpongeBob you have ever seen,” I see the kids’ eyes watch me, delighted as I turn their suggestions into something visible. For a moment, the gap between the man and the child vanishes–under the omnipresent performer’s nerves I find myself engaged once more in a form of play, testing out forms and ideas on the whiteboard, seeking something that waits for me to make it visible as it lingers in the ethereal world of the imagination–something that would not exist without me or without each and every one of the kids and parents looking at me.
As a kid, it didn’t occur to me that what I was playing on the piano was as much my grandmother’s creation as my own–a product of her imagination as well as mine. It makes for a strange kind of wisdom–knowing that the product of our effort and imagination is valuable precisely because it can be shared. But that wisdom makes it worth the performer’s nerves–nerves that, much as you hate them, are exhilarating in their own way. And with that wisdom comes an enticing question: What else, dear artists, can we make together?
