I woke up this morning thinking about a painting I made 44 years ago.
No idea why.
I hadn’t seen it. Nobody had mentioned it. I hadn’t been looking through old photographs.
It was simply there when I opened my eyes.
A toy soldier. Some alphabet blocks. The French Revolution.
Apparently my subconscious had scheduled an art critique for 6:00 in the morning.
And just like that, I was sixteen again.
In 1982, I was taking art from Susan E. Gill at Tekamah-Herman High School.
Mrs. Gill had curly red hair and usually wore some sort of floral pattern complemented by a coordinating solid and scarf. She was fun, encouraging and always pushing us to do something better than whatever we’d just done.
She’d write comments on our work.
“Darker shadows. Needs more depth.”
“Push your imagination.”
Sometimes just:
“Ohhhhh!”
You could pretty much judge the quality of your work by the number of H’s.
I never got a bad grade in her class, which for me meant a B or better.
We tried practically everything.
Watercolors. Oils. Acrylics. Pottery. Screen printing. Lithography. Commercial art.
We even cooked crêpes.
At the time, I didn’t think much about why an art teacher in Tekamah, Nebraska, occasionally had us making French pancakes.
Years later I learned Mrs. Gill had graduated from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln and then studied at the University of Bordeaux in France.
France.
Holy shit.
I’d been taught by someone who had gone off and stomped around the same sacred ground as Matisse, Toulouse-Lautrec, Goya and a few centuries’ worth of starving artists.
And then she’d come home to teach us.
Suddenly the crêpes made sense.
J’ai pigé.
About this time, I was really getting into acrylic paint.
I liked its flexibility. You could thin it and work with it almost like watercolor, but once it dried, it stayed there. If your artboard got wet later, your masterpiece didn’t suddenly become a colorful puddle running across the table.
For one open-ended assignment, Mrs. Gill basically turned us loose.
Do whatever you want.
So I experimented.
I used dry brush. I sprinkled salt into wet paint and watched these wonderful crystalline patterns form as it dried.
And somewhere along the way I came up with an idea.
The French Revolution.
I painted a toy palace guard standing watch over the fallen stones of the Tuileries Palace.
Except the stones weren’t stones.
They were children’s alphabet blocks.
History through the eyes of a child.
When I finished it, I looked at my masterpiece and thought:
Well, shit.
It looked childish.
Mrs. Gill apparently saw something I didn’t.
She wrote:
“Magnifique!”
I don’t specifically remember knowing the assignment was going to be entered in an art competition. Maybe she told us. Maybe I’ve simply forgotten.
But somehow my little toy soldier left that classroom.
Then it won Best of Show.
It turned out that 1982 was the inaugural year of the Congressional Art Competition. I was a high school sophomore who had somehow won.
My painting advanced to an exhibition at the Joslyn Art Museum in Omaha.
There’s a photograph from the Burt County Plaindealer to prove all of this happened.
There I am.
Sixteen years old. Skinny. Holding my painting and wearing a The Cars shirt because they were my favorite band.
Apparently I had already nailed the starving-artist wardrobe.
I also still have a letter dated May 19, 1982.
Congressman Hal Daub wrote to tell me about the award.
I never met him.
Not then.
Life went on.
I graduated. Went to college. Became a designer. Went into advertising and marketing. Eventually I started my own company.
I spent most of my adult life being paid to come up with ideas and find different ways of looking at things.
In other words:
“Push your imagination.”
Thirty-two years after Hal Daub sent that letter, something happened that sixteen-year-old me couldn’t possibly have imagined.
Hal and I became Brothers in the Scottish Rite in Omaha.
Then we became friends.
One day I showed him the letter.
His letter.
May 19, 1982.
He looked at it.
And this enormous smile came across his face.
He remembered.
For a moment, 32 years disappeared.
The congressman who’d written to a sixteen-year-old kid was standing beside the man that kid eventually became.
I got to close that circle with Hal.
I never got to close it with Mrs. Gill.
She died in 1990.
She was only 50 years old.
By then I was still young enough that I probably hadn’t figured out what she’d actually given me.
Maybe that’s why she showed up this morning.
Memory does that sometimes.
Something you haven’t thought about in decades walks through the door, sits down beside you and waits for you to finally understand it.
The strange thing is that the part of that painting I disliked most was the alphabet blocks.
They made it look childish.
Forty-four years later, I think they were probably the best idea in the whole damn thing.
Delacroix had already painted the French Revolution.
It didn’t need another Delacroix.
It needed a sixteen-year-old kid from Tekamah, Nebraska, looking at it his way.
Mrs. Gill knew that.
I didn’t.
Not yet.
She’d written it on my artwork plenty of times, though.
“Push your imagination.”
Maybe some memories don’t come back because we’re looking for them.
Maybe they come back when we’re finally ready to see what was there.
This morning, mine came back carrying a toy soldier and a handful of alphabet blocks.
Magnifique, Mrs. Gill.
It just took me 44 years to understand the grade.
If this resonated with you, you’re not alone.
