Sally Breslin: My Life: I GUESS I HAD A DIFFERENT INTERPRETATION OF THE WORD "ART"

Last week, I spent an afternoon looking through all of the artwork my mother had done while studying for her degree in commercial art back in the 1950s. Her drawings were so perfectly detailed, I truly was awed.

Mom's fashion sketch

There was a time when I desperately wanted to follow in my mother's footsteps and also become an artist. In fact, back when I was in the eighth grade, after a lot of pleading with my parents to part with their hard-earned money ($150 worth, which was a small fortune back then), I finally convinced them to let me enroll in a weekly class at a local art school. Sure, I knew my mother could have taught me all I needed to know about commercial art, but I wanted to learn how to create paintings of things like landscapes and wildlife. I also thought it would be pretty cool to be able to say I’d actually “studied" art.

There were about 10 kids in my art class, most of whom were older (high-school age) and more “artistic” looking than I was. Two of the most visually interesting were Mary, who had waist-length black hair and always dressed in long black skirts and black turtlenecks, even when the temperature was 95 degrees; and Paul, whose trademark was a tan beret and a white silk scarf – which I thought were pretty unusual fashion-accessories for a guy who was only 15.

Still, I was there to learn how to create masterpieces, not socialize. I wanted to emerge from the course with enough talent to churn out dozens of oil paintings that would sell for thousands of dollars each and enable me to buy property in Tahiti by the time I was 16.

During our first class, the instructor told us to draw self-portraits by closing our eyes and feeling our faces, then transferring what we felt onto the paper. My self-portrait came out looking as if my face had been run over by a cement truck. And when I brought my first effort home to show my parents, my father said, "Hey, that's a really good drawing of Alfred Hitchcock, sweetie!"

The next week, we were taken to a park and told to sketch anything that caught our eye. Most of the kids rushed over to a statue surrounded by flowers, but I chose some drunk guy who'd passed out on one of the benches. At least I didn't have to keep telling him to hold still while I sketched him.

The third class, the instructor announced that we were going to be working with oil paints. I was thrilled, not only because my sketching skills were so pathetic, but also because oil painting meant lots of bright, pretty colors to experiment with.

We each were supplied with a canvas, easel and paints, but curiously, no paintbrushes.

"We are going to do something called texture painting," the instructor explained. "I want you to put the paint onto your canvases using anything other than a brush, then create as many different textures and designs as possible. You should be able to close your eyes and run your fingers over your paintings and feel each distinct texture."

I wanted to ask him how he ever expected us to learn anything if he kept telling us to close our eyes and feel stuff, but I held my tongue. To be honest, I didn't know what the heck he was talking about anyway. I wanted a paintbrush and I wanted to learn how to paint pictures of lakes and mountains. I didn't want to do some weird painting that had to be touched to be appreciated.

Not certain where to start, I watched Mary, the girl wearing all black, as she dug a nail file out of her purse, then used it to smear red paint onto her canvas. She then used the bottom of a lipstick tube to press little circles into the paint.

I fished through my pockets and found a plastic comb with a few teeth missing, and decided to use that. I slapped some blue paint onto my canvas with it, then raked the comb through it to spread it around.

"That's wonderful!" the instructor praised me. "I love all the symmetrical ridges in your paint! Such texture! Such exquisite use of pattern!"

That convinced me. The man was in desperate need of a long vacation.

Paul, the kid with the beret, wanted his painting to be a true original, so he pressed his nose (sideways) into the paint, and then his knuckles. There were a few other body parts he also wanted to use (strictly for the sake of art, he said), but thankfully, the instructor stopped him.

Halfway through the "texture" class, Paul came over to check out my work. "Not bad," he said, as if he were an expert on the subject. "But it needs something." He eyed the heart-shaped, rhinestone-bordered locket I was wearing on a thin chain around my neck. In a flash, he grabbed the chain and tore it off me, then pressed the locket right into my painting.

I was just about to call him every unflattering name I could think of, when the instructor walked over.

"What a perfect focal point for your painting!" he gushed when he saw the heart impression left by the locket. “Wonderful concept!”

Paul walked away, smirking, as I tried to figure out how I was going to get cerulean-blue oil paint out of the rhinestones.

We had to work on those terrible texture paintings for the rest of the course. Every time we thought we were finished, the instructor would tell us to add another layer of paint and do MORE texturing. By the time I finally brought my masterpiece home, it weighed about five pounds.

My parents, who never were very good at concealing their true feelings, just stared blankly at it.

"We paid $150 for THIS?" my father finally said. "What the heck is it?"

"An abstract texture painting," I answered.

"Does your instructor like to…drink?" my mother added.

I never saw that painting again, mainly because my mother said it caused too much pain in my father's wallet whenever he looked at it. I suspect, however, that it’s still concealed somewhere in a dark corner of the basement in the house where we used to live...and the cobwebs are adding a whole lot of new "texture" to it.

Sally Breslin is an award-winning humor columnist and the author of “There’s a Tick in my Underwear!” “Heed the Predictor” and “The Common-Sense Approach to Dream Interpretation." Contact her at: sillysally@att.net.

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