Art School

Art Studio 

One of the things Eleanor dreamed of doing when she left her job was spending more time in her art studio. For years, Eleanor had been making collages and drawing. Most recently she had been drawing roses. She had a lot of roses in her yard and picked them to put in vases. One day she began drawing them and found it addicting, trying to get the shapes she drew to match what she saw in front of her.

But collage had been a part of her since she was a child. Eleanor remembered sitting under a buffet table at the age of 6 or 7 and cutting out paper dolls. Families of them. Fathers, mothers, children. It occurred to Eleanor when she became a therapist, that young Eleanor was trying to put together a family because her own was falling apart.

Harlequin

Eleanor created a studio in her garage almost 15 years ago. She spent once or twice a week in the studio making collages out of paper, magazine cutouts, original stencils and spray paint. She was drawn to making figures which could hang from the rafters in the garage and dance in the breeze. One of her favorite pieces was a Harlequin figure, which was originally called Pierrot until Chauncey pointed out that Pierrot usually dressed in white.

Muses waiting at the door

Now that Eleanor was not employed, she devoted some time each day to doing art and was finding it hard to keep going when the voices in her head suggested that what she was making was not really any good and looked quite amateur. Chauncey, a lifelong writer, told Eleanor it was important to just keep showing up and ignore the voices. Trent, an experienced painter and art teacher, told Eleanor to leave the critics at the door and keep doing what she liked to do. He added that there was nothing like a trip to the art store for more supplies to call forth the muse and handed Eleanor a bag full of assorted colors of spray paint.

Trent's comment reminded Eleanor of the time her friend Nate took her to an art store in Taos where he was supposed to be writing poetry but ended up making hundreds of incredible postcard-sized collages during his residency there. Nate and Eleanor combed the store looking for nontoxic liquid and a special tool to transfer photos and words from the advertising pages to paper for collages, a technique Nate had perfected. 

Belle Bottoms

In his book, Outliers, Malcolm Gladwell states that it takes 10,000 hours to master one’s craft. Eleanor wondered how many more hours she had before she could call herself a master with scissors and glue.

Twenty-Something

When Eleanor went into the garage this morning, she noticed Lila’s friend’s bike was leaning up against the wall. She saw that his car was gone. Eleanor figured that Lila’s friend was not up to the task of putting his bike back on his car after an evening of pub hopping with Lila and her cousin last night. All three were in their twenties and, at the moment, approaching life in similar ways.

Lila, 21, was taking time off after two years of college to be a nanny. She declared she was happy to have her own business and to be earning money. Lila’s friend, David, 23, was attending the local community college. Following high school, he went to college in Washington for a year or two, became disenchanted and left to spend six months in Argentina. Lila’s cousin, Emma, 23, graduated from college in Montreal last Spring and was, as she put it, “trying to get her life together,” working as a bartender and traveling when she could.

Friends gathered in the living room of the railroad flat.

Eleanor began thinking about how she and Chauncey had spent their twenties. They graduated from college in Los Angeles and moved to New York City with several other friends. Most of their friends were actors trying hard to get their Equity cards so they could audition for paying roles. Chauncey and Eleanor went the graduate school route. It just seemed a whole lot easier than actually figuring out what to do with the rest of your life.

The summer theater company.

One summer, though, Eleanor was persuaded to join some of these friends in Vermont to be in a summer theater company. She had to call up her uncle and ask for an advance on a small inheritance from her mother who had stipulated that Eleanor could not have the money until she turned 25. Eleanor was 22 at the time. Chauncey stayed in the city to work and write a novel, though he was a frequent visitor in Vermont.

The view from the kitchen in the railroad flat.

One-year old Prudence and eight-year old Daphne in Vermont.

As she thought about being in her twenties, Eleanor was struck by how much she and Chauncey moved around. During their seven years in the city, they lived in two apartments in Manhattan, one of which was a railroad flat in the West Village with a bathtub in the kitchen, and one in Park Slope. Then they spent ten months in Vermont where Chauncey was a bartender and Eleanor a freelance editor. By this time, in their late twenties, they were married and had their first child. Still, they drove across country with their one-year-old daughter and eight-year-old Samoyed to return to Los Angeles where Chauncey’s family lived and where many of their actor friends had landed.

Eleanor was 30 by the time she had decided on a career path. Chauncey was 31 or 32. Eleanor smiled as she closed the garage door and saw the bike waiting patiently for its rider to return.