Personal statement: informal essay 3

UnJi Nam
Mrs. Elliott
AP English Lit
25 August 2008
Famous
I am famous to a battered set of aged color pencils. They are blind, deaf and dry mouthed; the yellow one is pockmarked with the marks of my toothed distress, and the Deco blue is spindling away to nothing, spinning aerie and wistful spun on its roiling past of sheets. They generally lie in a rainbow clatter on the top of my desk, and are often left for weeks at a time languishing under dust and thread of glue. But when I do use them, I do so with a fury. The satin wood is carved bright under a box cutter until the sharp eyed steel finds the vein of pure pigment. The once pointed pencils now spend most of their time in stub-nosed labor. The wee morning hours, then the late morning hours will pass by without notice, and one measures time by the ages between each new re-sharpening. I use them ferociously, and they in turn leave me shaky-eyed and ambivalently proud of a new piece of art in the morning’s light.
Ours is a partnership. We have aged together well, and like those in an old marriage, we understand each other, and make allowances henceforth. I pare the wood carefully away from the sensitive color, backbone and life span of the pencil. Stripes of color always apply smooth and strong, without having to leave valleys crisscrossing the surface to do so. There is also responsibility at work. I ply light colors, especially flesh tones, carefully away from pencil lines, since the two blends easily, and tend to make variations on the color of a dead salmon. The pencils will not shift to inform me what colors look devilish together, or will join only to form mud on the paper. They will not murmur when what started as a candy-pop picture of sweetness sours to clotting rainbow matter degenerated all over haphazard space. The fault lies solely with the artist. She should know better. Or so I thought.
I remember when I first inherited the set from my sister in middle school. It was a limited edition set of 72 shades, and they were Prismacolors to boot, meaning these were one of the best to be had in the glorious world of color pencils. Soft buttery wood that didn’t fight with the razor, color as vibrant as pastels, and the pencils themselves cool to the touch with imposing gold leaf lettering indented on the side. No more of those dry and squeaky Crayola affairs. As an aspiring artist, I hoped I had the talent to properly do these pencils justice. In those early days, I took them everywhere with me, to school where they would be jostled, borrowed, trodden on and whisked out at every opportunity. They collected in a puddle of magnificence in the bottom of my purse, and served many uses, among them good luck charms, fake claws wedged between knuckles in drama class, and swipe tool to collect coins that hid under the refrigerator. They were beloved, and some did snap in the process. In those bright pastel days, art was everything and yet nothing. There was no perfection, no such concept as serious art, and no such bully as the muse known.
Things changed, as it does. An artwork of mine met with honorable attention at a student art competition. All of a sudden, I was expected to recreate the airiness of the original, forge it with ease again and again. And I wanted to as well. What was once only a fragment of a dream, a fleshing out of a feeling, was now important and flush with meaning. When I would once start drawing instantaneously, I would now look at the uncertain paper and fight with myself, plead with the gods to make something positively breathtaking. Something to make people stop and notice. I’d think back on other inspiring works of art that drew praises, and try to recreate it in my own way. Though my skill level had not changed much from before to now, now was the constant scrutiny, the constant judging—and more often than not, constant anguish over my pale imitations. The pursuit of perfection, which had belonged to many a better artist before me, was now mine as well. Art was no longer a social hobby, involving friends who wanted cats or flowers for binder art, but was now a serious activity involving quiet, cold and wide rooms with only self-doubt and brief, sweaty-palmed glories speaking to me.
And my artwork and skills did improve under the tyranny of self-doubt and lust of importance, the need to grab attention and soul of my audience. This was power that I in my other lives as little sister, quiet classmate, or bookwormish student never possessed. And by the time I entered high school, my faithful Prismacolors were still with me. Except now, the pencils were always to be found in their original gold-embossed package, neatly arranged and carefully sharpened. I carried them to school in a separate bag, and made sure not to drop a single pencil for fear of breaking the fragile twig of color within. Art was no longer spontaneous for me, shown in the rigidly perfect and fearful compostions, and in the tightly cosseted pencils. I would spend hours fighting with the blank paper trying to perfect the idea spinning in my head before commiting a single line. The act of drawing and coloring became painful cycles in self-doubt and misery over whether I’d made a mistake in picking Night Blue rather than Royal Violet. But I fought doggedly on clinging to the art long after it became a chore; through late nights of frustration and tears, nail marks embedded in palms, and gut clenching jealousy of other artists who seemed to carelessly waltz through their work and win awards while my own painstaking work went unsung to an early grave. The pursuit of perfection through other people’s opinions was destroying the reason why I even started drawing, long past when I was five and rollicking with candy bright markers on the wall. I was so engrossed in perfection that the organic love of just creating was forgotten. I had metaphorically sold my soul to the devil for the things that I thought my art could bring me: accomplishments, self-esteem, the regards of others.
Nowadays are more calm days. Life, more often than not, levels out most human efforts. But I’ve never luckily lost the joy of creating, slim though that flame faded. Now I try no longer to use my art so much as a accomplishment, a skill used to please other people, and hence myself. I have little desire to be famous now as the word is defined by Hollywood and the world. Rather, I look to Naomi Shihab’s version—namely, that famous which is that I “never forgot what it could do.” Not to let my color pencils and I be merely decorative for others. But to know that I have my own strength, to live apart from my fears that demand me to be famous, popular, accepted by all. That I and my passion can live together, famous to the other, and that would be all we ever demanded of the other. Not fame, not money, not social acceptance. Just a comfortable silence and well-worn nubs of color.