Kathleen McCall:
Occasional�� Muse�

2002-01-17 - 8:40 p.m.

Art and Limits

I am looking today for a part of a gift for my youngest daughter. I bought her a set of oil pastels, and I want to give her some paper to go with them. I want newsprint, cut sheets, and most important, I want a very large quantity of it. Newpsrint is the most inexpensive paper, wonderful for sketching and drawing. But so far, I have only found pads of it expressly for drawing, and they've had a small number of sheets AND been ridiculously expensive for newsprint. That will not do, at all.

What I want her to have is the luxury of no limits.

I think of my writing. When I sit down to write, I have no thought of supplies. My limits are all my own, internal. I have plenty of words, and I know where to get more. There are right ones and wrong ones and all kinds in between. I can make whatever I will with them. Even if I composed on paper - and I don't any more - I would be able to afford yellow legal pads by the dozen, to hold all the words I know over and over. When I can't get it right, when I'm uninspired or trite or simply wooden, it's not because I haven't enough paper or enough raw words to try again.

Then I think of some great artists, who did not have money for supplies. I think of paper being a franc and a franc being food for days; I think of how pigments were very dear, and how while charcoal was available, what did one draw on? And yet from that place came great art; from starting one canvas, knowing one had only that canvas, only a certain amount of cadmium yellow and no money for more. Art will transcend barrriers.

But I know I am not a genius, and my daughter does not know yet what she will be. For us, for now, there is a great gift in having enough - enough time, enough words, enough colored pencils, enough paper. I never have to think "I have only one more pad, I will have to write very small" or "I have only twenty-six characters and some punctuation, I should make it last as long as I can." With words, I can spend and spend, and in the spending perhaps find something worth keeping.

I want her to have that. I want her to be able to think, "That unicorn is not just the way I wanted it to be; I want to start over," and do it without thought. I do not want her to think, "I have only two sheets left on my pad, perhaps I should not try the unicorn again because it's so hard." I want to give her the gift of no external limits, that she may find her own internal ones, and have the chance to break through them.

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