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On Twitter, Jonathan Wilson posed a provocative question: “What was the most important high school or college course you took outside your own career path?”
I’ve written previously about how learning to type unlocked a tool that allowed me to process my thoughts at the speed they happened. I’d put this up as my answer for the most important high school course, even though I first took a typing class in summer school between fifth and sixth grade, and by the time I took it in high school, I was highly proficient.[1]
The college course was Art (some number), Oil Painting for Non-Art Majors.
I took it second semester senior year as a total gut course, one of those gen eds you pick out of the course catalog smorgasbord because it checks the right box and you’re looking to coast to the finish line of graduation. It met once a week at night, and I convinced two of my friends and fellow graduating seniors to join me. We filled Big Gulp containers with vodka tonics and went and painted for three hours a week.
I have no memory of the name of the graduate teaching assistant who taught the course, but I remember overalls. He couldn’t have been much older than his students and knew that none of us were going to go on to a life of painting, and yet the experience that semester had a direct result in the path I ultimately took back to graduate school in creative writing, rather than law school, which is what seemed to be my destiny at the time.
He instructed us in the basics, like gessoing a canvas, how to use a grid to mark proportions and how perspective worked. Every last bit of it was beyond my meager ability. My first attempt was a painting of the U.S. bobsled team in a style representative of LeRoy Neiman, and during the class display where we shared our work, my TA said something like, “That’s okay, you’ll do nonrepresentational art. That’s where all the money is anyway.”
For the rest of the semester that’s what I did, nonrepresentational art, a series of abstracts, including one canvas we built in a trapezoid shape that required me to use the geometry I half learned in high school for the first and only time since I half learned it. I don’t know if my paintings were ever good, per se, but they became … interesting.[2]
I had no particular postgraduation plans, other than securing a job that would allow me to remain living independently of my parents, as lovely as they were. Just prior to spring break, I met a young woman with whom I have been in a committed relationship since, and nurturing that seemed most important. I assumed law school was on my horizon as I would join in the family profession, but I had no enthusiasm for it.
Because class was three hours and most of it was spent working, there was lots of time to shoot the shit, including with the TA. I think he must have been the first artist I ever spoke to at length. We quizzed him about what he was doing there, what his stuff was like, why he’d chosen this particular path. He was the very definition of chill about life, but if you got him talking about art, he’d fill your ear for the whole class. (As I recall he was a Hockney fan.)
I was majoring in writing, and greatly stimulated by my writing classes, but the idea of pursuing it as a vocation seemed impossible, pointless even. My writing professors would share tales of their own apprenticeships, but those days seemed so removed, their past struggle didn’t seem real. I had no sense of how someone bridged the gap between where I was and where they were.
My art TA, on the other hand, was in his apprenticeship, and he was happy and made the whole idea of pursuing something that fascinated you seem possible. A year later, when I was working my postcollege job as a paralegal at a Chicago-based megafirm and the deadline to take the LSAT came up for the next admission window, I looked at the legal pads on which I’d been writing short stories when I should’ve been working, stories I was sending to my now long-distance girlfriend for Lord knows what reason.[3]
I thought about this guy who suffered through teaching a bunch of people looking for an easy A, and who was not worried about how to achieve material comfort in the indefinite future, the guy who was interested enough in his work to talk your ear off about it.
Those legal pads seemed to augur a more interesting future than the law.
I wasn’t wrong.
[1] We learned on manual Royals, which meant by the time computers arrived with their far more user-friendly keyboards a few years later, I could already type fast enough for Mavis Beacon to marvel at my proficiency on the Apple II.
[2] I kept them for years, all the way through graduate school, hanging them in my apartments. Ultimately, when it was time to leave Louisiana and head home to Chicago, I had enough room in the car for two out of the three: my books, my art, my dog. My art went to the curb but was snatched up by a passerby before the garbage came. I wonder if my stuff is hanging in some living room in Lake Charles, La., or if they just broke the frames into pieces to burn the wood.
[3] She still has all those letters in a file box, bundled together with a shoestring. The return envelopes are stamped with the law firm’s address. The thought of anyone (including my wife) reading those letters ever again makes me cringe to the bottom of my toes, and yet I’m still glad they exist.
