It’s taken a while, but I think I figured out where my daughter got her artistic genius. It all boils down to a pot holder — red, white and blue, with a smattering of green and yellow mixed in to give it an unexpected twist — that I made in summer camp once. I remember the counselors all foamed at the mouth with praise over what a masterpiece it was. Even my own father seemed impressed with it; he made sure to keep it wedged in the seat cushion of his La-Z-Boy so he could use it to clean the dirt out from between his toes while he watched TV.
So obviously, Mae’s genius can be traced directly to my own, as the early signs don’t lie. I think it all started for Mae in our old loft at the Telephone Factory, where we were surrounded by artistic geniuses. It’s practically in her blood, come to think of it, as I have pictures of Mae at the baby shower Daniel and Grant threw for me at Daniel’s place across the hall. We are absolutely surrounded by artistic art, not the least of which were Daniel and Grant festooned in fringe and full makeup looking like a pair of country-singing drag queens. You have to look close to see Mae, in fact you need an ultrasound machine, but I can tell, even from this picture, that the girl has promise.
Yes. That’s it. After all, years ago — way before my uterus ever had an out-of-body experience and came back knocked-up with Mae — these very same neighbors must have seen an artistic kinship in me when they approached me to ask if I wanted to participate in the first of many annual studio tours.
“Do you make any art?” they inquired.
“I make some mean pot holders,” I said.
“Perfect,” they said, so I signed up. Of course, I then remembered I also had a bunch of photographs of artwork on the Berlin Wall I’d taken during the fall of communism in East Germany. At the time, I was a flight attendant with a weekly layover who was too broke to buy “real” art, and here was all this art ready-made right there on a big wall that they were set to demolish anyway, and here I was with my 1973 Fujico with the automatic winding mechanism that sounded as subtle as a helicopter blade, and so, you know, click.
“These are fabulous,” effused my neighbors. “Where have you been hiding these? Oh, my God, you are going to have to charge at least $500 a piece. At least.”
“Really?” I said. Hell, I was just looking for something pretty to put in my kitchen. That’s because I am very modest for an artistic genius, you see. But the truth is I absolutely did know their value as I captured the images. “These are fabulous,” I thought with absolute conviction, click. In fact, one of the first things I did after I developed the photographs was try to think of ways to market them, because surely they were worth reproducing for posterity and profit, right?
But then, straight from the camera shop on the way to the hip stationary store where I planned to ask the proprietor’s advice, I stopped in at a hip restaurant for some lunch and proudly showed the photographs to the waitress. “Aren’t these fabulous?” I said. She sniffed about 70 times, probably from hoovering lines of blow off the back of a pizza pan in the kitchen, and said, “I don’t see what the big deal is.”
That’s all it took. I realize now she was just speaking through her own doubts and outright fears, but at the time they were enough to crush my conviction and send me straight home. Looking back, I could always ask myself who was she to say what is and isn’t art, but the bigger question is, who was I to say she could say what is and isn’t art? An artist, after all, is nothing without conviction. It was six years before I looked at those photos again.
So when Mae drew a shoe and called it art, I said, “fabulous.” Then, when she made 48 other pieces depicting 48 other objects and called it a collection, I said, “fabulous.” Then, when she built a ticket box and said she was going to put on an exhibit like our former neighbors at the Telephone Factory do every year, I said … “uh, fabulous” again.
But at that point, a tiny voice in the back of my brain that sounded a lot like a washed-out pizza waitress started blobbering about how maybe I oughta slow Mae down a bit. Maybe I oughta not let her hopes get too high. Really, a show? For the art of a 6-year-old? But Mae has the conviction of a true artist. “This is my art,” she said one morning to Eric, the owner of Solstice Café, where the walls are covered in grandiose works of art, which is probably why she felt compelled to show him hers. “I’m putting on a show,” she said.
Immediately, Eric volunteered to host her show right there in his restaurant. So there you go. My 6-year-old is about to have an art show. I can’t believe it, but my belief is unnecessary. True, I have my doubts and even outright fears, as any idiot parents who are honest with themselves do, but thankfully they are nothing compared with the conviction of a 6-year-old.
Hollis Gillespie is an award-winning humor columnist, NPR commentator, “Tonight Show” guest and author of two acclaimed memoirs, Bleachy-Haired Honky Bitch: Tales from a Bad Neighborhood and Confessions of a Recovering Slut and Other Love Stories. To register for her writing workshops, The Shocking Real-Life Writing Seminar, visit www.hollisgillespie.com.
This article appears in Feb 14-20, 2007.
