Five Years a Writer

The art teacher came up to my desk, leaned over my shoulder and said, “Amanda, that’s what they get mental patients to do!” — a comment that did not exactly build my confidence as an art student. (Nor was it a high point in the field of teaching, shall we say.) We had been given carte blanche in art class that afternoon so I was experimenting by dropping wet paint onto a sheet of paper, folding it over and smoothing my hand across it. I found the resulting abstract shapes of colour quite appealing. The art teacher did not. Oh well. I had no aspiration of a life in the visual arts at that time. But fast forward five decades and I find myself wanting exactly that and, while getting closer to being able to say ‘I am a collage artist’, I also hold back from saying it with gusto. Could my reticence go back to that one experience in middle school? Can I really still be stumbling on that man’s ill-judged comment? Maybe, but I think the notion of being a Creative, that is, someone who spends...