This is not a self-portrait, though it could be. I painted it when I was an undergraduate at Middlebury College in the 1980s. My professor wanted us to get obsessive about a subject, so I was painting a series of benches. I was on my second or third sitting of this one, when I arrived to find another student had hijacked my perch. I plunked down behind her and painted her into my composition. The likeness was uncanny. I also had a short, brown pony tail and was wearing a blue sweatshirt. The fact that the figure looks like me but is “not me” reflects my ambivalence about myself as an artist. I’ve always felt that I have technical skills, but no burning, original vision to make me “good enough” to be an artist.
Yet when I dip my brush into paint, I feel a sensation similar to what Elizabeth Bishop describes in her poem “At the Fishhouses“:
If you should dip your hand in,your wrist would ache immediately,your bones would begin to ache and your hand would burnas if the water were a transmutation of firethat feeds on stones and burns with a dark gray flame.If you tasted it, it would first taste bitter,then briny, then surely burn your tongue.It is like what we imagine knowledge to be:dark, salt, clear, moving, utterly free,drawn from the cold hard mouthof the world, derived from the rocky breastsforever, flowing and drawn, and sinceour knowledge is historical, flowing, and flown.
Immersing yourself in a creative act generates a bone-aching sensation; it pulls you into a deep, mysterious core of being—a state of flow. I’m ready to stop worrying about whether I’m good enough and let the paint flow.