They used to call me artistic.
I never saw myself as an artist. Yes, I was very good at sitting down with a pencil and drawing exactly what I saw in front of me. Sometimes, I believed that the finished product was even “perfect.”
At times, I used a pen, instead, and pointillism as my technique, countless tiny dots making up a whole. Or a crow quill pen and the tiniest of strokes; the dots or strokes simply more plentiful to demonstrate the darkness in the scene. I loved ink, because it was more of a challenge than pencil. So easy it was to make the drawing irreversibly dark, that it took infinite precision.
I mastered it.
But I was not an artist.
I used to watch my brother Jim at work with a pencil, pen, charcoal, colors… Jim was an artist. He would sit with pad in hand and out of the depths of his imagination, could create something beautiful.
I envied him, and at times would try. I loved faces, and after drawing them perfectly for so many years, I should have been able to draw one without looking at one.
I could not.
I was not an artist.
People used to ask me how I learned to draw so beautifully.
I did not learn; I just did. I would sit down with my pencil and I would look at what I wanted to put on the paper… and I would simply duplicate it there. I simply saw what I saw, and put it on paper. I didn’t understand why everyone could not do the same.
I thought they just didn’t try hard enough, if they couldn’t do the same.
It never occurred to me that it was not how I used a pencil or pen, but how I looked at what I saw, which was different from what other people did.
I saw faces, and saw the perfection in them. I duplicated that perfection and inner beauty, with lines and curves and shading, and people called me an artist.
I was not an artist. Artists create. I was only plagiarizing what “someone else” created. Stealing their imagination.
Oh, how I wanted to see the pictures Jim saw, in his mind. But in mine was only darkness, made darker by the shame of my unintentional yet unceasing deception.
