Making Art Because

learning the shape of story through the silence of my hands

My tools on a wall, photographed in early light

My father died four years ago, and I’ve never been the same. We never are. There’s more we want to say. There’s hurt we want to ease. There’s a certain kind of love that now has nowhere else to go. I see my father and me in our quietest times, sitting by a garden, talking. I see my father at the end, when I couldn’t help him. I see my father’s casket on the day we slipped him into the hill beneath the carillon bells, when it was just a tight circle of nearest family, and when there should have been so many more.

I began to make the art I make because my father is no longer here. I did this despite the fact that I am married to an actual artist—a maker of exquisite ceramics vessels, remarkable oil paintings, clever illustrations, studio-quality photography, divine graphic art—and I can’t draw so much as a circle. Who was I to buy the acrylics, brushes, paper, scissors? What right did I have to overtake the kitchen, morning to night, working on a small wheeled table and cluttering the sink until there was no other choice but to remove the fold-out couch from the single guest room and fill the new void with high tables, sliding drawers, a wall upon which to hang triangles, rulers, tools, a wall my husband designed and chalked.

I don’t deserve an entire room, I said. My husband was determined.

I’m not an artist, I said. He shrugged. He pounded in a nail. Another.

It is there, in that room that my husband rearranged, that I teach myself my limits, then work my way through. No, I cannot draw, but I love color and shape, and abstraction is a kind of metaphor, and a torn edge is an extended thought, and if you follow the curve of a line in your mind, you can follow that curve with a needle. My art is the puzzle I solve, the thing I can touch, the reason I believe even more fervently now in compression, crystallization, juxtaposition, and white space when I do sit down to write.

Every mistake I have made with my hands is a lesson about words, structure, proportion, scene. Every small success is a confirmation that there is more to do, more to try, more reason to keep making. Piece by piece, thread by thread, I learn the shape of story through the silence of my hands.