Artistically speaking, at the age of ten or so I was a ditto machine. I could take a picture, be it a portrait of Mickey Mouse or She-ra, and recreate it with pencil and paper. People said I was good at drawing – they should’ve said I was good at copying. Their encouragement led me to believe there was some tiny artist deep down inside me with a black beret and pigtails, snapping her fingers to a slow, inaudible beat. Together, we produced near-carbon copies to the beat of her finger-snapping, drunk on the juice of someone else’s creativity and the belief that we were some kind of artistic team.
While hand-drawn recreations can get you an initial “oooh” or “aaah”, you’re eventually expected to create something original. “Yes, Ashleigh, you drew another picture of Bugs Bunny. Good. Now try to imagine something and draw it.” I soon saw this beret-ed artist for who she really was: a poser. A faker. A wanna-be, right down to the John Deere cap she tried to fashion into a beret. She was no creative artist…she was a plagiarist.
In school, as cotton ball, glue-stick, and coloring projects were pushed aside for the more serious art of reading and writing, linguistic art proved to be more of my artist’s thing. She guided me through literature and the pages of typed proof that I would create to show I understood the symbolism between dandelions and life.
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On Friday night, TJ and I walked down to the corner café for cappuccino and a game of UpWords. My little artist was buzzing on caffeine and the possibility of trouncing TJ, the naturally talented artist she knew she could never be. He might be able to turn a lump of Play-Doh into a fully-working carousel, but she – she! – could think of words. This was her turf, and he was in for an old-fashioned whompin’.
The first two words of the game formed a large L on the board. Those of you familiar with the strategy of the game know that, whereas it’s thrilling to branch off words and fill up the game board with witty verbiage, the person who can change nab to nub to nip to nub and back to nab again will win every time.
While I spent the entire game fretting with my artist over how to use my j to change TJ’s “poops” concurrently with the “oxen” intersecting at the first o in “poops,” TJ forged ahead. As the canyon between our points widened, I became immersed in the crumbs of overheard conversation between two girls – strangers – at a nearby table, where my artist had joined them. I pouted over my cappuccino and my painfully slow adding capabilities. I’m the word person. This wasn’t fair. Pictures are his thing. Words are mine. There was no reason he should beat me by more than 20 points.
The no-crossing, double yellow line between the visual people and the linguistic people is supposed to be very, very clear. Like the line between the living and the dead. He beat me on my own court with his “nubs” and “poops.” My confidence was as low as it could go for the night. However, the caffeine I sucked down throughout our match left me fidgeting to do something.
“Let’s go home & do some papier-mâché.”
It seems my little artist is a masochist. Insult and injury are her preferred poisons, and she will belly-up to the bar and shoot this stuff like it’s water. Failed at our craft? Okay, then, let’s give something we weren’t good at in the first place a shot.
With nothing pressing us at 7:30 on Friday night, TJ willingly obliged. After scratching funny monster, duck, and year-long holiday decoration (something encompassing every holiday icon…a reindeer with bunny ears wearing an American Flag, possibly) off our brainstorming list, we decided upon a scapegoat.
I was itching to get to the crumpling and taping and tearing and gluing of LA Weekly started (this was my virgin papier-mâché experience), but there was research to complete first. What kind of goat should it be? With horns, or without? Nubby knees were a must.
We started with the horns. TJ crafted at one, while I wrestled with the other. We finished at the same time, two completely different horns lying in front of us. Let’s put it this way: if TJ walked down to the Santa Monica Pier, holding his paper horn in front of him, people would comment, “Oh, yes, it’s a horn. A beautiful horn. May I purchase it? It will look absolutely stunning next to the Chihuly on our solid-gold coffee table.”
Mine looked more like a piece of paper rolled lengthwise wrapped by a thin strip of masking tape at either end. A paper stick. If I held mine out, people would most likely throw spare change at me.
TJ crafted along, saying things like, “Accentuating specific features will make it funny,” and “Little bulges for the hip bones would give it a more realistic effect.”
I was still pounding away at my horn stick when he offered to make the other horn. I moved on to the hooves.
Our scapegoat project stretched across the entire weekend. The project took us down to Michaels craft store at the beach for paint, which then took us into a sporting goods store, which then led to us dreaming about being super-hip snowboarders some day (mainly because the gear is just so cool), which then led us to buy a lottery ticket and discuss which cities we would choose for our multiple Spanish-style homes. We laughed, then we laughed harder that night when he saw how I tried to use camel-colored paint to make the knobby goat knees look “calloused.”
Throughout the weekend, we would look at the goat drying upside-down on our table and laugh, asking, “Does this make us weird?”
Yes, probably. It’s a goat made out of newspaper that we went so far as to paint and give special features. I almost bought a miniature straw hat for it. But, there was also something freeing about the process – setting out to make something for absolutely no reason other than because it crossed our minds. No worry of failure. No expectations. No winning or losing: just the joy of being silly and nibbling at the bait of our inner artists’ childish impulses.
Ahh…an original Vincent Van Goat. Don’t forget to make some paper mache tin cans…for the goat to munch on. I can’t wait to see the finished product via iChat.
For your next project, you might want to try a papier-mâché Chihuly.
What fun. Word games with an artist. That was me and my brother. He would also come into my sports turf and turn a game of P-I-G into M-I-N-I P-I-G-L-E-T-E-E-R-S. A writer friend and I now play Scrabble with the rule that you have to make up a story at the end of the game using all of the words on the board. Try it sometime.