Steve Braunias' art.
Steve Braunias attends an art class.
Anyone who can pick up a pencil or a paintbrush and make some sort of mark on a page is an artist, and anyone who believes that is insane. I have been taking art classes these past few weeks. I sit in a quiet
room and sketch, draw, paint. Pretty much everything I've created is really lame but once in a while, now and then, something happens, magic, chance, luck, and I create something merely fairly lame.
It was the travel editor's idea. He sent out a group email saying there was an opening for someone to take art lessons with a view to drawing or painting a scene from their travels. I got in first. I thought: I can draw. Faces, mainly, all of them hooked-nosed, grotesque, in profile, smoking, with long legs and long feet, their thin mouths forming unhappy, sardonic expressions. The same face, over and over, with minor variations – bald or bearded, so a man's face. Very well, they're all mirrors, all autobiographical. But there is a pleasing certainty about the lines. Sharp, confident, sure lines, pressed deep on the page, nothing vague or wanting revision. I can draw.
I can't paint. Besides, I hate colour, don't want a bar of it, drive it out of my life. "Grey," sighs my daughter after I wake up in the morning and get dressed, "again." Jacket, shirt, pants, shoes, head to foot. I'm a column of fog, a puff of smoke. Did Picasso have a Grey Period? Show me it at once.
People are forever urging other people go outside their comfort zone. I like my comfort zone. I read in it, write in it, watch telly, shop for records, collect pine cones from the nearby woods – the list isn't endless or especially interesting. It was a shock to sit in the art classes when I first turned up. It felt strange, foreign, impossible. It was a discomfort zone, but I never missed a class.