Sketches of a Bygone Artist

My dad reads Facebook more than he should. He walks for an hour every night after dinner so he doesn’t have to take medication for his blood pressure. He complains intensely about having to go to Best Market with me because he is watching The Hunger Games for the third time in a week. To the lay observer, he is a passive walker through life, without passions or succinct hobbies. And why should he have passions? He is a single dad raising two girls who are at ages where all they really need is a maternal presence. He is constantly stretched too thin, fibrous ends of celery fraying haphazardly in any direction.

But I know that in his past, in what feels like now a past life, he was a passionate sketch artist. I’ve discerned this from fleeting instants, while cleaning out old file cabinets or organizing cold plastic boxes rotting in the bottom of unopened closets or clearing off a cluttered desk. We stumble across amazing portraits of strangers in LIFE magazines or figures in portrait classes many years ago, or unidentifiable cartoon faces imbruing his March 2006 calendar. I mean, they are really fucking good. I pronounce how amazing they are, and he shrugs.

So two Christmases ago, I bought him six art classes. I was hoping to reignite this quiet passion, to provide some outlet which might take him away from his daily trepidations more meaningfully than “Two and a Half Men” marathons.

Upon opening the crisp white envelope, he remarked plainly, “I’m not even sure I can hold a pencil anymore.” Two years later, the gift card remains buried beneath miscellaneous papers in the top left drawer of my mom’s old desk. I think the classes are expired at this point, though it was a small ma-and-pa art store and I think if he went in, they might accept him anyway. He won’t, though.

Is this a story about a passion in need of reigniting? Of growing up, growing old? Of losing touch, or of gaining touch? I don’t know. I don’t have an answer. I probably never will. For now, though, it is enough to stumble across his work in infrequent consequential flashes. To dream on my own about the person who drew them, to wonder where he might be now.

-NG