THE ART OF ARDOR

“I was thinking more… how about that forest green I made for you,” my daughter kept suggesting, each time I neglected her newest mixed color and chose something patently stupid, like the grimy gray-purple I kept applying myself to, in the hope of improving it, and then clearly failing to affect any change whatsoever.

We were playing a game we call color turns, in which we take turns adding features to a shared geometric design that we invent as we go. This time we were using watercolors, those most renegade supplies of the kindergarten art club, so my auto-cringe mode was engaged, preparing for the age-old rite of Throwing Brushes.

Hearing my son arrive in a room is kind of like listening to a bowling ball move through several multiverses at once. He entered the house with his signature series of thumps— the breakage of the house’s seal as he yanks the sliding door with his body at a forty-five, the hard strike on the kitchen tiles of whatever awkward, heavy, tetanus-inducing item he’s hauled over the threshold with him, and two thumps from his boots, which he flings from his heels while he walks, with or without the socks inside them (and these may hit a cupboard or two as he makes his way through the kitchen). Sometimes, if he finishes with a flourish, he will take his jacket off and fling it, and it’ll snag and perform a take-down on some other item, like a stack of flatware or pile of cookie sheets, and end the auditory fireworks show with something a little tinnier, for spice.

This SOP symphony was mostly complete by the time he’d crossed the whole kitchen, and he entered the living room, where my daughter and I were adding some final touches to our Color Turns painting.

I tensed up a little. This is a kid who has been known in the past to locate and systematically ruin his sister’s art if we don’t tape it to the ceiling as soon as it’s done. I generally figure this crazy-making move is rooted in garden-variety jealousy, fueled by a Spartacus-level muscular energy, and reinforced by a rather deep barb of self-aware shame.

I very quickly learned something different. It was revealed to me, in short order, what the actual source of so much art-strife had been, for so long: pure, magmatic love.

The mud-smeared sibling, still trailing cold air from the outdoors, rushed towards the painting. I surreptitiously laid a ring finger on the edge closest to him in case he was gunning to peel up an edge and yank. It had to be a super-subtle move because I didn’t want him knowing I was braced for the worst: he has antennae for self-fulfilling prophecy that pick up even signals from as far away as the Andromeda Galaxy. I have to wear a tinfoil hat not to accidentally suggest truly terrible ideas to him from my Library of Parental Fears and Mortifications.

It didn’t matter, in the end, because when I looked up, I saw his entire face glowing. He looked like some medieval painting of a saint for which the artist’s patron had instructed him to use enough gold leaf to make it completely fire-proof. My son shone with a delight so pure I thought one of us might pee our pants— either the feeler or the beholder of the feeling.

“Oh, Sister,” he said, voice breathless and swooping, eyes wide and throwing sparks of a precariously high-temperature joy. “Is that…” — his hands did a little reaching flutter of desire as he gasped— “for me?”

He had delivered the question with the gravity and drama of a neon-blonde, 45-pound Scarlet O’Hara. He stood completely still inside the aftermath of his devastatingly earnest inquiry, so committed to the swirling of wonderment that his sister actually looked up from her sixth re-mixing of the forest green.

“Well, maybe not this time,” she said, offhand. She is used to the force of his effusion. The perpetual fire and flow of his passions may or may not inspire her to move a few inches to the side so he can pass without dragging her into the blackened swath of destruction behind him. Often, partly charred, she’ll just stand up without comment, dust herself off, and quietly return to whatever she was doing. (Even very first steps were met with the freight train of her brother’s welcoming joy:)

For the most part, we try to sort of “judo” Brother’s energy, flowing in a similar direction whenever possible, using its momentum to aid in the shaping of its trajectory, and saving outright opposition for when it’s really quite strictly necessary; otherwise we’d all be charred heaps all the time. So it was interesting to me that Sister chose this particular occasion, in the incendiary glow of the Art Collector’s Ardor (the real cause of all our art-strife, to date), to issue a kind but clear “No.”

His face crumpled. His breathing quickened. He made little jolts to both sides, as if searching for some tool that might help him, and came up with nothing. He stood, with his hands still out and ready to receive the object of his desire, apparently utterly at his sister’s mercy. I held my breath.

“It will be five dollars,” she said.

Suddenly released from his trembling helplessness, propelled by the excruciating vulnerability of hope, he slingshotted up the stairs in a thunder of haste. Sister continued calmly re-mixing the forest green.

When Brother returned, he had a hot fist of quarters he must have taken from his father’s bedside table drawer. He was out of breath, and held out the coins towards his sister, who seemed to have already forgotten her proposition that he pay. I prompted her.

“He’s brought you money, love,” I said, hoping very much that she would accept payment and we could all move through this spasm of passion relatively unscathed. She looked up, opened a warm little palm, and, to my great relief, smiled when she saw and was able to count not five but six coins as they fell into her hand. (I wasn’t going to point out that this was six quarters, not six dollars, not when her affinity for shiny things might just carry the day.)

She accepted the money with a little help, as I reminded her that we had several of these paintings elsewhere and would make “absolutely, fifty more!”

“Mama, can I put this somewhere safe?” Brother said, still breathless and quivering*.

*[It has come to my attention that certain friends of mine operate under the misconception that I somehow exaggerate the intensities of my reality. I can assure you that “breathless and quivering” is not for shits and giggles: it is, if anything, a mild understatement of the facts.]

I said yes, and he walked slowly, shuffling, carrying the thing with both hands, as if he were in possession of a glassware lily or infant hamster. He placed it on the nasty-ass built-ins (WHICH WERE BUILT ON TOP OF SHAG CARPET WHAT IS THIS WORLD) and turned to face us, flushed with the ease and pleasure of fulfillment.

The next day, he brought the painting to school with him, “to show everyone.”

*

Yesterday, my husband and I were out roaming the region on a wine-tasting adventure (a rare and joyous occasion brought to us courtesy of the best nanny in the cosmos), and, as usual, at some point we started talking about art. This time the topic was people we know who don’t seem particularly generative of art themselves, but whose committed and pure-note appreciation is, itself, an art.

My husband took a second to remember some of the Appreciators from his childhood, which, on reflection, somehow seemed rife with them— and how they kind of made everything go round. There was a different quality to his reverie when he turned it from the Creators to the Appreciators, a kind of softening and brightening.

It’s an odd thought, in part because it sounds a bit obvious, but I think it’s also a precious piece of knowing to hold a bit closer than we generally do: that we need creators and appreciators. Receptiveness to what’s created is as important as the creations themselves, if not even more expressive of our humanity.

There’s a way in which my son’s ecstatic reception of my daughter’s painting added a layer to the experience. Or maybe, removed a layer from the experience to reveal a truth.

It’s the responses we make to creation that allow us to hear the pulse inside the commerce of beauty. It’s our responsiveness that allows us to rejoin the flow from which we, and beauty itself, arise. That flow, that place? I think it’s really just a heart, and another heart, and the movements— sheesh this is key— between.

This is a gentle NOT CRANKY AT ALL reminder to my readers that liking, commenting, and sharing bump the algorithm in ways that allow more people to read this kind of thing, perhaps instead of another article about the best wrinkle creams. Which I can demystify for you anyway. Just message me.