Drabble 26 – Nature Morte

I’ve never been much good at visual art. The vision in my head is almost never what turns up on the page, and I spend so much time striving for perfection that drawings typically get rubbed out by my eraser before they get the chance to fully take shape.

I took an art class in middle school–just one, because that was arduous enough. No matter how much praise I got for my oil pastel self-portrait or the seamless blending on a colored pencil name tag (which I remember as being the project I was most proud of), I gave up on visual art because it was just too hard.

Editing fiction is invisible–you don’t see the steps to get to the final product, and I can trash or burn the first draft as a sort of sacrifice to the writing gods if I feel it’s awful enough. There are layers of work in visual art (and digital art is a whole different animal), but I can’t stop thinking of my own failures buried deep beneath layers of graphite and oil and paint.

Anyway, here’s a drabble.