...percipated by 1001 fonts and a dream of your hand on my thigh.
For seven years (those delightfully formative years -- 17 to 23 -- when everything was just so squeaky new, lemon fresh, and first blush perfect) I studied toward my MFA (performance) while sidelining toward the same in painting. The performance work had been steady since I was a wee one and the allure was addictive (despite the fact that I wasn't “the type”) because the paychecks were enormous compared to my (lower) working class upbringing. It just seemed so... easy... and we all know (from previous blogs) that “easy” is never the path.
For performance classes I embedded my own trigger word (“paycheck”) to activate my persona (Actor) that would, in turn, wrap herself in a persona (Character). I could play Actor for hours on end. It was the best type of cosplay. Like classic Julie Andrews (my first crush) in “Victor/Victoria,” I was a person playing a person playing a person. At the end the day, I would walk out of the classroom, remove the Actor accessory and meet eyes with another student... or teacher... or visiting parent... in the hall. Linger a second too long. Hold out one hand, palm up, cock my head. Little itty bitty smile that was west of a grin, closer south to a whisper. “Can I paint you?”
When I say I miss New York City, I mean those nights. The dorm window open. The city sounds wafting in. Night like a lover filling my sacred space called Creation. I remember first connecting passion and rain, the midnight that a thunderstorm soaked me, my model, and my freaking canvas, too, and I never stopped. My hair, rain, paint, ripped white tee, blue jeans... all of me... all my subject, dark olive skin, black leather jacket, open white jeans... seemed to become one image, burning in my mind, traveling like serum through my chest and my body. Eyes together, always together, it was the best sex I ever had... without ever touching another person.
Interaction. Sensation. Response. Catharsis. The physical labor of art. Painting is more alive than performance. I guess I'd just rather be working class. I want it to be difficult. Don't want it over in two-point-three minutes (on average). Want it all night, muscles bunched, trembling, hours on end, with half a dozen techniques and a whole lot of colors exploding across the canvas, my body, the room.
And now I see you, baby, in everything that I do, the art and you are all mixed up. Every move against canvas, every time the brush and me are just right, right there. I want to know it’s good and mine. The texture, tooth, grain of the canvas, the paper, the wall. I want to feel the force up through my shoulder, shuddering up my arm, across my back, with every stroke, every thrust, every careful hue. I fell in love so hard. It was so perfect – size, shape, your smile – the late nights, all nights, my body finally striped down to jeans and tank, streaked with sweet sweat, and bluegreenredyellowpurpleblack from a canvas taller than I am. I couldn’t let it go any more than I can let you go now. I wanted it so bad. All the time. Every night. Singing hallelujahs into pale dawn skies because God gave us these bodies, these brushes, this time.
And it got better. Is that possible? I didn't care about skills getting better (though that happened too). Just cared about the intensity. I wanted everything heightened. Everything alive, flashing passion and power through the room like heat lightning. I would cram, memorizing lines... then walk the halls looking for my fix. It was an addiction so demanding, so specific. “Hey. I'm E.J. Can I paint you?” I don't remember ever getting a “no”... maybe because the school was geared strictly toward performance (with my art classes on another campus) so everyone I was approaching were actors, pianists, other musicians. There's something inherent in these types that make them say “yes” to any attention that immortalizes them. Though, it has been said, that secretly everyone wants their portrait done.
In my second year, I stopped having to ask for models. I was still a year away from my first public show but word was spreading like wild fire in that closed community. There would be a soft knock just after eleven... or (in that adorable way that grrls have... and boys, too, apparently...) a note would scoot under my door. “Do you have a model this week?” Sometimes in flowering script, other times in sloppy block letters. Sometimes as a shy whisper, other times as a shout across the study hall.
I felt that life was complete.
After school was done, I followed that easy performance path for a while. Made my trek to the hellmouth (LA not Sunnydale) and paid my dues. My paintings were all purchased. Hanging in strangers’ homes. A few with my parents and grandparents. One with a close friend. I left my passion behind because I was all grown up now. I was being responsible. I doodled but I didn’t own an easel. Don’t make me print an analogy for doodling compared to painting. You know where I’d go with that one.
Time passed, years passed. I started to feel... lost. I started to feel... empty. I started to feel like life was lucrative and pretty much without meaning. Then, as all of you know, I happened to be at the convention... I happened to meet back up with that writer... I happened upon game design by way of mathematics. She handed me that perfect O.S., all graph-paper-charts-probabilities. She pointed me down the bramble thorny path and said, “Why aren’t you over there?”
I learned that mathematics was as seductive as painting. I learned that the perfection of binary is, of course, a product of the mortal mind carrying the immortal seeds of the cosmos. Like straight lines and steel, silicon chips and Twinkies, in nature, zero doesn’t exist. And if you think that space is vacuum... well, honey, go back to the blog about the Higgs and then let’s vacation at the LHC. Or heck, let’s take a daytrip to Menlo Park and watch the also-ran SLAC bust open uncuttables like I pop a pomegranate and watch the rubies bounce and dance against a white China bowl. There is no nothing. The ancient Olmec with their first appearance of zero six hundred years before Christ, were our first mathematicians. And me, breaking down the numbers to build a TCG, found my way back to painting, back to creation, and all the way back around to that impassable but always impassioned path that had waited for me, patiently, all those years.
You bust open an atom and you’ve got a handful of treasure. Protons, neutrons, electrons. Go further for quarks, antiquarks and gluons. They all work together, itty bitty noms hanging with the family. Running their own little empire that runs the matter that makes the world. You bust open that atom that’s me and you’ve got math and paint and games and God. You’ll find scripture and motorcycles, puns and passion. And it all works together, running that empire that runs me ragged. Keeping me on my impassioned path that leads me to Him... to you... to all of you... and back again. Like that endless circle that is the Large Hadron Collider, all those particles wanted nothing more than to just shoot straight ahead – the easy path! – but instead wind up coaxed, bent, guided around and around in their own circle game.
The impassioned path is hard but it will be paved with things He knows complete you. And the completion of you has nothing to do with man’s filter, man’s law, or cultural diction. I walked away from the money, in short, to minister. To hip hop, pop culture, leather and cycle my way into the lives of people who need something. Need a Him they don’t know exists because society has shoved that other Him down their throats. I walked away from man’s money, and He gave me back my brush, He stretched my canvas, and He nudged my shoulder and said, “Hey, E.J., ask if you can paint her.”
What’s inside your atom?
E.J.
