3. The First Marks
At eight, I began making my own images. My sisters played together, but their games returned to the same beginning and followed familiar rules. I preferred a corner of the courtyard, where I could draw a shape in the earth with my finger, sweep my hand across it, and begin again. Nothing had to survive in order to matter. The ground received every attempt without judgment, and erasing one image did not feel like losing it; it simply made room for the next.
I wanted colored pencils, but ours was a large family, and I understood that such a wish might remain just a wish. One day I found a piece of charcoal and drew on a plaster wall. My mother saw the drawing as she was leaving the house and warned that I would be punished when she returned. I waited. Then the waiting itself became material.
Beside the drawing, I wrote in charcoal: “It is nine o’clock, and Mother has not yet returned to punish me.” A little later, I checked the time and added: “It is nine fifteen, and I still have not been beaten.” I continued writing these reports until the wall held not only an image, but a live record of my approaching fate. When my mother came home, she looked at the drawing, read the sentences, and burst into laughter. The punishment disappeared.
That wall gave me an early glimpse of what imagination could do. It could not always remove fear, but it could change my position inside it. By turning the threat into a story, I was no longer only the child waiting helplessly for what would happen. I had become the observer, the narrator, and, for a little while, the author of the scene.
Around the same time, an elderly stationer noticed that I stood outside his shop day after day, staring through the glass. What held me there was a box of colored pencils. One day he called me inside and asked whether I knew how to draw. I answered honestly: no. He set a sheet of paper and the pencils before me and told me to try.
I began at once, working quickly because I feared the pencils might be taken away before I had used every color. I drew two mountains, a tree, the sun, several clouds, a river passing beside the tree, and as much grass and as many flowers as the page could contain. The man watched me with surprise.
“You said you could not draw,” he told me.
“I couldn’t before,” I answered. “But then I drew it.”
He gave me the pencils. Their colors opened possibilities I had been watching from the other side of the glass, but the deeper gift was his manner of giving them. An adult had noticed my longing, invited it into the room, and allowed it to become action. He did not make me an artist; he showed me that a possibility could be treated as real before it had proven itself.
3. The First Marks
At eight, I began making my own images. My sisters played together, but their games returned to the same beginning and followed familiar rules. I preferred a corner of the courtyard, where I could draw a shape in the earth with my finger, sweep my hand across it, and begin again. Nothing had to survive in order to matter. The ground received every attempt without judgment, and erasing one image did not feel like losing it; it simply made room for the next.
I wanted colored pencils, but ours was a large family, and I understood that such a wish might remain just a wish. One day I found a piece of charcoal and drew on a plaster wall. My mother saw the drawing as she was leaving the house and warned that I would be punished when she returned. I waited. Then the waiting itself became material.
Beside the drawing, I wrote in charcoal: “It is nine o’clock, and Mother has not yet returned to punish me.” A little later, I checked the time and added: “It is nine fifteen, and I still have not been beaten.” I continued writing these reports until the wall held not only an image, but a live record of my approaching fate. When my mother came home, she looked at the drawing, read the sentences, and burst into laughter. The punishment disappeared.
That wall gave me an early glimpse of what imagination could do. It could not always remove fear, but it could change my position inside it. By turning the threat into a story, I was no longer only the child waiting helplessly for what would happen. I had become the observer, the narrator, and, for a little while, the author of the scene.
Around the same time, an elderly stationer noticed that I stood outside his shop day after day, staring through the glass. What held me there was a box of colored pencils. One day he called me inside and asked whether I knew how to draw. I answered honestly: no. He set a sheet of paper and the pencils before me and told me to try.
I began at once, working quickly because I feared the pencils might be taken away before I had used every color. I drew two mountains, a tree, the sun, several clouds, a river passing beside the tree, and as much grass and as many flowers as the page could contain. The man watched me with surprise.
“You said you could not draw,” he told me.
“I couldn’t before,” I answered. “But then I drew it.”
He gave me the pencils. Their colors opened possibilities I had been watching from the other side of the glass, but the deeper gift was his manner of giving them. An adult had noticed my longing, invited it into the room, and allowed it to become action. He did not make me an artist; he showed me that a possibility could be treated as real before it had proven itself.