Jan 08 2009
Vive L’Artiste
Over a year ago, my partner surprised the heck out of me. She was getting drunk one night and suddenly declared that she felt like drawing. Picking up a pencil and some paper, she sat down and proceeded to create a really abstract, but very interesting, drawing. It turns out that she’d always wanted to draw, but no one had ever let her: she’d always been told she produced rubbish and had been discouraged. Now, bear in mind that I’ve known her for over fifteen years: suddenly discovering that she’s an artist was a bit of a shock!
Shortly thereafter, on one of my regular food shopping trips, I picked up some basic coloured pencils from WH Smith and gave her them as a present. She almost cried: as I said, no one had ever encouraged her before. Since then, she’s produced a couple of dozen pictures, her style slowly developing over time. I think they’re great. Though they’re by no means the sort of thing most people would expect to see in a gallery, I honestly don’t see how they’d be out of place: for someone with no training, she’s very good.
The only problem with this is that, over time, the desire to draw has become associated with getting drunk. It’s like that guy in Heroes who could only paint precognitive paintings when he was high on heroin. For the most part, that’s fine - it keeps her out of my hair when she’s drunk and she’s happy scribbling away - but towards the end of the first bottle and on into the second, it starts to become a pain. Since she suffers from anxiety, she has a habit of asking my advice all the time and requesting my reassurance that what she has produced is good. As the evening wears on and more alcohol disappears down her throat, she asks more frequently. And more frequently. Being interrupted every ten minutes starts to get annoying.
For the past few weeks, she’s also started twisting this into yet another thing that requires my efforts and then upsets her. Example: she can’t draw a particular thing, so she asks for my help. I have a go at it and produce something vaguely representative (I can’t draw, but I can produce geometric shapes fairly well and basic forms of familiar objects), but then she’ll rant for ten minutes that it’s no longer her drawing because I did all the work.
I’ve explained a dozen times that the idea is the most important thing: just because someone else traces four lines to help out does not mean that it’s rubbish. But, of course, she’s drunk and doesn’t want to believe that.
Tonight is a drawing night. It’s been four days since she last got drunk, which is excellent: she’s managed to stick to that cycle since the new year, rather than descending once again into the ‘once every two days’ mess. Give it another week or two and she should be onto a cycle of every five or six days - and from there, the only way is up. I have my fingers crossed.
Still, she’s drawing. Four requests for help in the last hour and in about another hour she’ll start colouring. That’ll take a while, then there will be the twenty-minute discussion of whether it’s good, whether it’s rubbish, whether it would have a place in a gallery. If she were sober and would draw without my help, it would be a beautiful thing. I love what she produces and I’m proud of it. As it is, with the influence of wine, she’s slowly turning something wonderful into yet another infuriation.
I hate alcohol.
