Ponder. For lack of a better word, ponder works for me, at least for now. I'm sitting at my desk at work pondering what to do next. You see, I asked my wife of sixteen years to edit a few stories that I'd written and by the time she was done, she'd come up with more questions than corrections.
Let me regress for a minute so you'll understand my dilemma a little bit better. For my entire life, I've always needed an outlet to express myself. When I was a teenager and all the way through my twenties I made an attempt at drawing. I wasn't bad and even considered going to art school for a while, that's when reality bit. I was taking a few night classes at the school just to see if I'd like it. They were pretty general and covered a bunch of mediums I'd never tried like ink and charcoal. It was a Thursday night and we were scheduled to do a pencil sketch that evening of a model. When she came in, there wasn't anything spectacular about her. She looked average, maybe about twenty-five with kind of light brown hair that was pulled back into some kind of bun I guess. We were sitting at our easels and I was sharpening a couple of my pencils, getting ready when my life changed; she took off her robe and sat down in a tall wooden chair.
All right, no big deal right? Wrong! I was just sixteen and if my hormones weren't racing before, they sure as hell were now. Screw it; they were now in hyper drive. I must have stared at her for five minutes before I even thought of picking up a pencil. This was the first totally naked female I'd seen in my entire short life. Like every other teenage boy I'd seen pictures in magazines but here, right in front of me, was a real naked woman. Like the lead in my pencil I was hard as a rock.
"Is there a problem?" my instructor asked as he stopped behind me while he looked at my blank sheet of paper.
I couldn't talk as I just sat there numb.
"Just draw what you see, forget about what she is," he whispered into my ear as I felt my face start to get really hot and I know it had to be beet red.
I picked up my pencil and took his advice and started to sketch. I started with her outline and worked from there. After a couple of minutes he was right, I didn't look at what she was, more so as just something or I should say, someone to draw. After what seemed like hours, she took a cigarette break and then went back to her chair. We drew totally for about two hours. I was just doing some minor touch ups when she came up behind me.
"Nice," was the first word I heard her speak behind my back. "My hips look that big to you?" she asked looking at my finished work.
"What the hell do I say to that?" I thought, trying to come back with something, anything at this moment.
"Just screwing with you," she said with a laugh, as I got red all over again as she walked around the room looking at everyone work.
The instructor looked at everyone's drawings, made a few notes and class ended. I had mixed feeling driving home that night. I'd seen my first naked woman and although it was wonderful, she didn't look like any one the pictures I'd drooled over for the past couple of years. Her breast weren't as big, she was heavier and her hair wasn't styled just so like the ones in the magazines. I guess she wasn't a Playboy caliber model. I found out that students and others were paid twenty-five dollars and hour to pose for the art classes. I was on pins and needles after that, until the next model turned out to be a guy.
When I walked into the house almost everyone was still up watching something on the television. Dad was in his 'chair' as my brothers and sisters all sat on the floor in front of our black and white TV. My mom, like always was on the couch with the newspaper reading it from cover to cover.
"Hi honey," she said greeting me as I past from the kitchen into the living room. "How was class tonight?"
"Pretty good I guess," I told her hoping to get my drawings up to my room before the next question that I knew was coming.
"Let me see what you drew tonight."
"Oh God, please just strike me dead," I thought to myself when I heard those words.
"Come on honey, let's see what you drew tonight," she asked again.
"Mom, I'm not sure ..." I started to say looking at my brothers and sisters lying on the floor.
"Come here, let me look," she said motioning me over to the couch.
I wanted to die. I wanted to fucking die as I walked over to her. I opened up my folder and handed my drawing over to her. No one, especially a teenage boy should ever have to be put in the position of showing your mother a picture of a naked woman you just spent two hours drawing.
"Oh my, this is very good," is all she said.
My mom was cool; she was the one who started me drawing years ago. I used to watch her sketch and paint when I was little. Why she stopped I haven't a clue, except maybe life and the additions of my brothers and sisters had a lot to do with it. I guess being straddled with a ton of babies' kind of takes priority over drawing, but she still was my inspiration.
"Show this to your father," she said handing it back to me as all my brothers and sisters now just had to see what I'd done.
I walked over and handed it to him as the rest of the brood looked on.
"She's naked," one of my sisters said out loud.
"Didn't she have any clothes on?" I think one of my brothers asked. By now I was three foot tall and shrinking fast as I tried my best to make this nightmare end.
"Kids, that's art. Your brother's going to be an artist when he grows up," she would always tell everyone but life isn't so kind sometimes.
I sat in the room as the panel of three looked at my portfolio. I had samples of the four mediums they required, and made sure everything I submitted was perfect. After about twenty-five minutes the instructor in the center spoke.
"Steve, you've done some excellent work here and no doubt about it you have talent but," there's always a but isn't there. "But, there are many more talented than you here. We will accept you into the school, if that's what you want. However, if there is anything else that you've been looking at or considering, it is my suggestion you look at that avenue also." In other words, I was good enough to get in, but I'd never make a living at it.
The school tuition was about seven thousand dollars a year plus supplies and neither my family nor I had that kind of money. Sometimes life really sucks. I still drew now and then but the wind had been taken out of my sail. Years later I passed onto my son what I'd learned, hoping that he'd go further than I had; but that also wasn't meant to be.
It took another twenty years before I finally found something I could sink my teeth into.
I received an invitation to fly on the Goodyear blimp. One of the chemical companies I was dealing with gave my boss four tickets and I was lucky enough to be one of the four picked. What a rush. I took my wife's Canon AE-1 camera and took the whole roll of thirty-six pictures concentrating on the blimp itself and all the others while we were sailing over the coastal area near Daytona Beach. I had the time of my life and was even given the opportunity to actually steer it for about two minutes. I was more than beaming when I got home and took the roll of film to the photo lab. Two days later I looked at my works of art. Crap, nothing but crap or that's what I called them. Out of focus, too far away, too close, about ninety percent got tossed into the garbage.
"Hon, I set the camera just like you showed me," I almost cried trying to figure out what I'd done wrong. Son of a bitch, I had two stinking pictures of my once in a lifetime experience and I wasn't happy. "Maybe there's something wrong with your camera?"
My bride shot a roll of film over the next couple of days and got it processed. Every stinking picture was in focus, clean and sharp; I was pissed at myself. She tried to explain to me what I could have done wrong but I didn't want to hear it at this point; I wanted my own answers, so I enrolled the next day into a beginners photography class.
It was class called Black and White 101. I needed a manual camera, developing paper, mats and a bunch of other things I didn't have a clue what they were used for. I learned about photography by learning how the camera operated, the techniques of taking a good picture and how to develop and mat a black and white photographs. I was hooked from the first night.
I spent years developing my own style and even built my own dark room in the back of our garage. Not to be tooting my own horn, I was good; I was damn good, good enough to sell more than a few pictures at an art show. However, it was an expensive hobby. Paper, chemicals and equipment all were crazily expensive, as I got in deeper and deeper involved. When I framed my ten of my best pictures it cost me almost a thousand dollars. We weren't rich by any stretch of the imagination so I'd probably spent monies that could have been used other places a lot more.
As technology advanced I stuck to my old school ideas until I was forced to upgrade to digital. I sold my darkroom, or should I say I gave my equipment away, lock, stock and barrel to a photography student who wanted to get into black and white printing. At this point it was basically worthless, as everyone else had moved into the digital age; including me. "At least someone would still get some use out of it." I reasoned as it had just been sitting there for the last two years gathering dust.
A digital camera, an Apple Computer and a couple of software programs and I was turning out the best work of my life. I took every available class at the art school in Orlando and even experimented with different types of medium that could be developed with additional software.
When I took two portrait classes and bought an upgraded software package for fixing flaws everyone marveled at my work. I could make anyone look like a model in no time at all, but the pictures weren't real. Don't get me wrong, they were better than good, but they weren't real anymore and now anyone could do it. With the new technology it was getting harder and harder to take a bad picture but something else changed, no one printed them anymore.
I had a thousand pictures on my computer but only occasionally printed any. I finally printed out my best work and put then in a folder just in case my computer crashed and I lost everything. However, there was little chance of that happening since I had cd's of everything that was on my Apple, even my earlier black and white pictures I'd had scanned into a cd years earlier.
I think I got to the point where I became bored with it. I still took pictures but they were few and far between. Now when I took a picture it was something specific I really wanted to shoot. Forget the sunrises and sunsets; been there done that. Forget the animals and birds; I had a million of each. The last thing I remember that I really wanted to shoot was a black woman with big lips, wearing a yellow hat, holding and kissing a red rose. I was going to take it in black and white and add color only to the pale yellow hat and her bright red lips. Where her lips were touching the rose, I would start to add color, red, so it looked like she was transferring the red color from her lips to the rose. I never put that picture together and still may before I give up on photography completely.
