A Blank Canvas

What is art? I mean, what truly is it? It means nothing to me. It but a simple fragment of what is all but meaningless to me now. A canvas with a vague colour, is all but a blank canvas to me. A stroke of nothingness--ironic really--reflective almost, like a mirror into the window of myself and what I have become. Perhaps what I always have been.

How long have I been staring at this canvas? Could it have been minutes? Hours? If canvases were to age in the way we do, I am sure it would be well seasoned with age, wrinkled lines fabricating the edges. I don't want to think about it though. It bothers me. Time bothers me. Time passes by so easily, yet I am doing nothing with it, but it still keeps moving so cruelly, tick by tick. I have yet to pick up so much as a pencil to sketch with. Do I even want to?

I have never thought I was meant for much. This is because I never really cared for anything, not that I could remember. Hobbies were thought to be feeble excuses of boredom and laziness in a house which there was simply no time for hobbies. Looking back now, could it have all been a green form of jealousy? One did not have the grace of a moments pleasure to indulge in something that inspires them, so they deem it folly and futile; as something one does not need. 

Yes, this is why I never thought I would do anything in life. Anything meaningful. Anything I would truly care about or enjoy. I like to think that because of this lack of interest in anything, that I was never particularly good at anything at all. It was the words of other's getting inside my head though, rooting a solid, tangible picture in my mind of a greatness I might have had, when I merely had but a potential at an averageness that looking back now, I just ran with, as I have never been particularly good at anything before that moment.

I remember that moment vividly. In the breath of warmth, on a small, quiet summer's Tuesday afternoon. There must have been maybe fourteen of us--children, I mean--sat in the heat of that old rickety barn mapped with cobwebs that they had somehow passed for a school classroom. It couldn't have been more than one or two in the dusky orange of noon when the teacher walked over to me and put that wretched idea in my head. That I could be an artist. 

To be completely honest, it may have just been, as I said, an adequate averageness in something that I had allowed myself to be brainwashed into thinking that I was far better at it than I was. Perhaps it's because I was too naive and it was the first time that I had been good at anything, so I believed that I might be better at it than everyone. Yes, it was indeed naive and foolish.

When I think about it now, the teacher was simply doing her job. Inspiring kids, making them believe in themselves. After all, instilling driven incentives and dreams in children is a great way to raise them. Perhaps she simply just felt sorry for me. I'm sure she would have noticed the emptiness in my eyes. She surely would have wondered if I had ever been complimented in my life and maybe this is what drove her to insanity. Pity on a poor child. 

Perhaps it is so, I am still bitter. A nature of my mother's I wished that I hadn't born along with her; resentment. For this reason, I think I still wish I could blame her. That teacher and her words, her fruitful, thoughtless, still ringing in the back of mind. The beginning to what seemingly has never ended. For if it wasn't for her, maybe I wouldn't be here right now, staring at a canvas full of art I can no longer see. An art that one cannot attach themselves to, an art with no story, could you even call it art? I already know the answer to that, so I have seeped into the wooden floorboards, my skin etched with a nothingness alike to the canvases that brimmed in this space. My cupboards, filled with foods I haven't touched for weeks which are probably spouting forms of black mold but I am too lazy to check. Bottles of wine scattered the kitchen counter, but I had left them there as a purposeful reminder. There was nothing but apricot jam rotting in over ripeness now in the far back corner of the fridge that I could recall. I can try to blame her, even after all these years, it is true; I am still bitter and with each passing minute I try and find a way to blame her kindness for the kind of life I am living now, but truth be told, there is no one to blame but me.

I pushed myself up from the floor, again defeated by the canvas I should not be at war with, staring blankly into my soul. It was beginning to shrivel my ego, not that there is much left of it anymore. I can't even remember the last time I left the apartment to do anything other than buy cheap wine and cigarettes that I am not particularly fond of, but like the wine they are cheap, so I have learned to live with it.

I gravitate towards my familiar nook in the corner of the world, my windowsill. I somehow managed the likeness of a small studio on the very edge of New York, a city that I can barely say that I live in, but I do, just on the cusp; an outsider. My windowsill--an extension of New York-- slides up and leads out to a small, chipped and barred outlet out next to the fire escape, a solace of mine I bathe in rather frequently, especially since the inside of my apartment has become unbearable; unfinished portraits and blank canvases of vast nothingness and forgotten dreams traipsed the space constantly reminding me of my failure.

The fumes of New York--of which nobody seems to talk about, but then again, people only tend to romanticise this city--solid, thick and dirty are more potent and pungent out here. Although they still manage to slip into the apartment, even with the windows sealed shut, it manages to find its way in, so I guess it isn't all that much different to the inside. In saying that, I have been here for longer than I would like to admit, so I suppose if nothing else, I am simply used to it, so it no longer bothers me, both the stickiness and acrid smoke of the city.

Sometimes I wondered if my life was always meant to turn out this way. If her words were all but a cruel trick of fate, a momentary lack of judgement, just to light a candle inside me, only to burn out with the wick that was never made to last. After all, I'm twenty-five with nothing to my name but a few scrapped paintings, dried paint and dull pencils. I don't know why I haven't given it all up yet, why I haven't just admitted defeat and thrown the towel in and begun move in a different direction. But then again I am good at nothing. I don't even know that I am good at art, perhaps mediocre at best, but this is all I know. Without art I do not know who I am, nor who I could be without it. Could I be anything else? Well, I am not even this, I almost have to laugh at myself. Pathetic.

All this work and where has it gotten me? I am nowhere. I am nothing. I have nothing. I am not even interested in the things that I paint anymore, so who else could be? Who is an artist without art? But worse, who is an artist who repulses art?

I did not move all the way to New York to be a waitress, but I suppose that is what every waitress has ever said. Any waitress that ever wanted to be something more anyway, which seems to be all of them. You stick yourself to a job far beneath you, but it is simply the impermanence you chase. The ephemerality of it. The fact that nobody in this line of work is here to stay, it is merely a job you have just to have it but never to keep it. Not for long. Yet, here I am, a stained apron of coffee and cigarette smoke and a little maple syrup hanging in the corner of my closet, in a feeble attempt to hide it from my mind in all the spaces of which I am not there. As if, if I push it far enough to the side, it will no longer exist, and I will no longer be a waitress at all.

I find a temporary solace in watching as people stroll under my window in the pale, acrid smoke that the moon highlights upon its string attached to the sky. I became obsessed after I lost interest in myself, with others. People. People I don't know. People who don't know me. People who live lives completely separate to my own. I like to watch them and picture their life. I love wondering what other people are doing with the brief existence they have here. I like to think--horrible as it may seem--that it can only worse than what I'm doing, but this may be a trick of the mind, or a plea to keep me sane.

There was a lady in a fur coat, her strut at first glance seems steadfast, as if she had important places to be, but I could see through her puny attempt at indifference. Cigarette concealed in the palm of her left hand, as if she didn't want people to know her life stability rested in the hands of vice; that she too, was nobody than everybody else. She had mascara stained her under eyes, a fashionistic attempt I will admit, at concealing what could only have been a lack of sleep. She had nowhere to go, but she didn't want to go anywhere at all. If she had it here way, she would simply walk to escape all that the night brings, or perhaps she was walking to consume the night? Perhaps within the night was where she found solace from herself, from a persona she must upkeep in the light of day and the night was a kindness to her, an excuse for her to shed her mask and become her unruly self. Yes, that was it.

I then caught sight of a gentlemen. He was keeled over, sat in the gutter at the corner of the broken street, just out of reach from the nearest streetlamp light. A very calculated move, hidden in the shadows, but just barely visible. He was wearing one of those ridiculous top hats that people believed made them look more sophisticated. I just think it looks silly, like a dress-up costume. He had his head buried in what looked to be a letter. It was crumpled in the corners, clearly over-used, read over and over and over and over again. How many times had it read for the paper to be so worn? Hundreds perhaps? His life seemed as though a reflection of that piece of paper, crumpled on the verge of being torn. One that you could read over and over again in hopes that the writing would somehow change, but it never would. It would always be the same, and end the same, and that is why he reads that letter, to humour himself.

My eyes widened as they landed on another, one entirely different to the last two, who seemed to be akin to the night. The night to the last two, was a friend in the sense of secrecy or simply a reminder of their life in the day and an escape from that. Yet this woman however, she seemed like she belonged only to the night. Her smile unmoved, her eyes like fire, I could see the vibrance in them from my window. She held a book in the right hand, the title I couldn't make out from over here, but she wandered. It didn't seem as though she had an end destination in mind but rather was just simply there for the journey of what will or will not be. She was not bothered by the world around her, rather she enjoyed it separately. She seemed free and she seemed happy. Not the kind of happy everybody has convinced themselves to be content with because true happiness depicted in stories and fables was unobtainable. No, the happy that nobody strives for anymore. A happiness within itself that is kin to a fire or deep passion, a happiness so pure I thought it to be a myth until that very minute and I almost felt like I hadn't breathed until then.

I threw myself off the windowsill and back into the pit of sorrow drowned in empty canvases and I laid my hands upon the first one I could see. Oh, how lovely it felt beneath my fingers. Like daffodils in spring, or warm sand on the beach. It felt familiar, not so distant. It felt wonderful but empty, oh so empty. This poor canvas. I picked up my brush and for the first time in I cannot even recall how long, I could see the pigments of colour that I had convinced myself were dull.

Visions of maroons and dark blues etched themselves in my mind. Oranges and reds like a fire beneath my skin. White as a symbol, vague in the context of what the consumed the cavas now. I had caressed every inch of it. What the time now? How long had it been? For once, I didn't care. I didn't mind. Hours might pass me by, and I wouldn't be so bitter about it and soon enough I was staring at a canvas that was looking back at me. An emptiness nowhere to be found.

Looking back at that moment now, I wish I could find her. That woman who changed everything. That woman who does not even know me, nor do I know her. Yet, she may be one of the most important people to me, for she reminded me that there is a joy in life and in the unknown. That even in the darkest of moments, clouded by feelings of dread and regret and unsure notions, there is still room to discover. There is still a light that can be found within ones self as there is not a single destination and there never will be. There will only ever be a journey. Without her, I wouldn't be able to call myself an artist. I wouldn't have allowed myself the pleasure of finally calling myself an artist, standing in a sold out exhibition of my works, both finished and unfinished canvases that I had once deemed not good enough, which now had the people in awe, searching for a meaning in each picture, my very name in their tongues and I was known. Each meaning extracted from my works, entirely different from the next, which is the most beautiful piece of art I had forgotten for the longest time. Art is but an inspiration, it tells an individual story to each person and reflects a new meaning with each passing set of eyes.

I wonder if she were here, what meaning she would find in my paintings. Would she find them moving? Would she find them drenched in a sadness, a lost feeling over overwhelming dread? Or would she find a silver lining in the mere strokes that I hadn't noticed before? I like to think she would like them in whatever meaning she found in them, and she would smile, just like she did then. I believe she is still smiling, even now. And I finally am too.