Gesture

Back when I was still learning things, I read that sharks have to stay in motion or else they’ll drown. By moving, they “breathe” as they push water through their gills, living by virtue of acting. I respect such an honest situation, and they are power in action. I didn’t understand it then, but after a few years of drawing still-lives, I came to automatically connect the two. Unfortunately, just like breathing, motion itself doesn’t seem to be enough to progress in the world.

These thoughts swim up through the road, my mind wandering even as I race across town. I know this trip and its timing perfectly; from my old apartment in the unpleasant southern side to the drawing studio above the struggling art supply store. I’m already three minutes late for the start of the session, and I should be able to make it there in another eight.

I’ve driven this trip three times a week for nearly seven years since I graduated from college. It’s not always from the same apartment and not always to the same studio, but it’s always for the same purpose, one thing that’s stayed constant for these years: drawing. I’ve changed over the years in ways; weight has dropped off from forgetting to eat, hair has grown out to my shoulders, and my face has developed the sharp, hard lines of any other object in motion. But my passion for capturing the energy and essence of an image on paper has stayed the same. The only problem is that recently, all of my drawings have been the same. Different poses, different subjects, but all the same feel and nothing new. So I keep drawing and hope that this is a temporary phase. Hoping that I can move beyond it.

By the time I get to the studio, Mary is already on the platform and undressing. The lights are set up and I am the fifth person in the room. I put my third pad of newsprint on the easel and open my toolbox. Vine charcoal, brushes for sepia ink wash, woodless pencils bristle from within.

She sees that I am ready and twists herself to her side, one arm out, the other in the air. For thirty seconds she holds the pose as the other artists and I try to transfer her to our pages. By the time I’m done, she’s already moved into another pose, this time leaning back and drawing an imaginary bow at the sky, aiming for thirty seconds. She continues to switch positions, and I fill pages with her frozen motions for a half-hour, thirty seconds at a time. She curls into a ball. She rests her head on her knee. She stretches out on one foot.

When I draw, my large hands rush across the surface of the paper. The heels of my palm brush against the fibers of the page, but I am careful not to mar the images. I tap my feet to the rhythm of laying down mark after mark, the process all an orchestrated dance on the page. My head bobs up briefly to see the pose and drops back down again to place the lines and tones. I ignore graphite dust that rolls down the pad and settles onto my pants legs and shoes, giving them a dull, metallic sheen. The flow of working on a piece motivates me; an object in motion stays in motion.

She is throwing an imaginary baseball when I ask for her to turn to her left a bit. One of the other artists, a thin, balding man in his late thirties, turns his head and gives me an upset look, either because I’m telling her how to do her job or because he’s already begun drawing her at this angle. Either way, I’ve probably known her for more years than he’s been drawing, so I don’t care what he thinks. Mary simply gives me a professional smile and turns on the balls of her feet, facing to her left about forty degrees. She can’t really talk while she’s working, but I know she spends this time planning what to say when she takes her break. Meanwhile, I am using the blunt end of my charcoal to describe the line of her throw, visible from this angle. It begins from her feet and can be traced up through calf and thigh muscles, across the back of her hip bone, over the ridges of her vertebrae, to the meat and bumps of her shoulder and down her strong arm. This pose lasts for a minute and a half, plenty of time for me to capture every bit of energy.

When the time is up, Mary takes her first break, putting on a robe and immediately sitting on a nearby chair and examining my latest drawings of her. Models are paid to stand still; they even keep from looking like they’re breathing. I envy their willpower, but I wouldn’t want to do that. It works better for Mary than my job does for me. My money comes from delivering food quickly from restaurants to hungry people; during my breaks, I sit in my huge, gray car and draw people that I can see from inside. The drawings don’t always look like the people, but they do look like what they’re doing. On Mary’s breaks, she sits on her grey modeling stand and looks at my drawings.

She studies a particularly fluid piece of her on her toes, arms raised in an arc above her head like a ballerina. It's done in a wash of ink, and at parts is so faint that it hardly stands out from the page. I wasn’t fond of this one; it had taken me some time to mix up the ink for a wash, and I hadn’t really gotten back into the rhythm yet when this pose was up. Apparently, she doesn't share my feelings on it.

“You always draw such a flattering image of me.”

“I just draw you. I don’t flatter you.”

We've known each other since even before I was drawing her; we no longer worry about offending each other. We may have been in love in the past, or thought we were, but that was long ago before we had other things to do. These days we just tend to each other’s necessities. She poses for my drawings, and I pay attention to her.

Mary leans back on her chair and absentmindedly rubs her upper arms, getting them ready for the longer poses that will come later in the session. “That drawing reminds me,” she blurts this out as if it really did just occur to her, “tomorrow night, there’s going to be a great party at my friend’s house. There should be a lot of people dancing, and you won’t know most of them, so they shouldn’t interrupt you, whether you want to dance or just sit in a corner and draw. In fact, there’s a fine corner you can sit in, with good lights and a little table.” She knows which of the two actions I’d prefer, and I hesitantly accept her planned invitation. Afterwards, she tells me the specifics of the party, all thoroughly prepared in her mind ahead of time.

“Well, it looks like my break must be coming to an end soon.” We both know the way it goes from here, and we carry out our script as a formality. Mary says, “I’ll pose for the more detailed drawings, now. The first one will last for ten minutes.”

By this cue, my tools are packed away and I’m already heading out the door.

The drive back home is little different than the drive to the studio. Same speed, even though all I ever have to look forward to is quiet dinners and falling asleep in empty apartments. They weren't always empty. For nearly a year, Mary and I had lived together. It may be hard to imagine now, but she’s the only person who knew me then, when I still saw everything as new and my drawings were still changing.

Thinking back over the night’s images, I’m frustrated at how similar they turned out. Of the dozens of images, only one stood out as different; the one Mary commented on. When I had finished it, I had written it off as a failure, but something about it must have caught her eye. But it refuses to make sense. In frustration, my foot grinds further down on the accelerator.

My sketchbook is sitting in the front seat, and despite my car’s speedy weaving through the streets, it not the book but the large packing boxes in the back of my grey car that slide from side to side as I slalom between cars. They're mostly empty, but not worth throwing away, so I kept them after I was done moving to my new apartment. I should get around to unpacking the ones I moved, but I may not be staying there for long enough for it to be worth it.

It's time for me to move again. Everything I have is still packed in cardboard. Four labeled “sketchbooks”, three “tools”, and one “stuff”. The last contains my clothes, tapes and phone; it's the lightest. I still have two empty boxes left, perhaps for next time. Looking out the window of the third floor apartment that used to be mine, I can see the run-down building across the street. I can see the empty fourth floor loft that I'll be moving into. First thing to decide is where I'll put my sketching table. Probably next to the wall, right up against the tall window, where I can use a well-positioned magnifying mirror to draw people on the streets below. The same people I've been drawing from this window.

This year, moving is less difficult, because my new apartment isn't across town like the last couple of times. This time I'm lucky, and the lowest price apartment was nearby. I take the boxes one at a time down the elevator, across the street, and up the uncertain freight elevator to 427B. On each trip, I kick the door of my ex-neighbor, a petty revenge for a year’s worth of petty annoyances.

Every week, I would sit on the fire escape of the building, listening to music and drawing pigeons. He would claim I constituted a health violation. At first I had assumed that he simply didn’t like my music, the fast, repetitive, wordless beats blazing from tinny speakers and bouncing off the opposite building to meet and cancel each other out. Once, I even decided to give him a chance, drawing the fast sketches to the busy sounds of the city, but it only seemed to bother him more.

Last week, he threw food at me from his adjacent window.

“What the hell do you want me to do?” I yelled back, ignoring the other listening tenants. The frozen hot dogs had only caught me on the left leg, but I was offended by the entire situation. The pigeons, accustomed to these outbursts, didn't even walk to the far side of the fire escape. They ate, slept and bred in the city; two yelling idiots didn’t concern them.

“Go inside and watch TV or something like a normal person!” His round face flushed with the exertion of yelling.

“I don’t have a TV! Why the fuck are you throwing meat chunks at me for being out here?”

“Get a job and buy a TV, slacker!” He threw a can of cola at me that missed and beaned the pigeon I had been drawing, stunning him in the middle of my sketch.

It was insulting to be considered lazy, so I reached out and threw back the nearest immobile object. It happened to be the bird. Pigeons aren’t very aerodynamic when they aren't trying to be, and it righted itself before hitting, but it was still enough to scare him into retreating behind his window.

In my new home across the street, as a comforting act of revenge, the first thing I tack onto the walls is a quick sketch of his face as he ducked back to the safety of his TV, the thick line of his fat head and neck, made tall and long by surprise and fear.

At about two in the morning, I’m still lying awake in the pile of blankets that acts as my bed, trying to get some sleep. My pillow is still packed, and my new apartment is still bare and dull. Fatigue beats at the sides of my head but can’t find a release, and I’ve been irritated about something for a little while, so I get dressed and take a walk outside to clear my head.

After leaving the apartment, it seems almost exactly the same as a dozen other times that I’ve taken these walks at night from across the street, but the different point of origin lends it enough of a flavor of mystery to keep me interested. I follow my standard walk from here, a block up past Herb’s Meats. As usual, the warm night wind bears an unpleasant odor of rancid salami from the back of the store, even after hours. There is a homeless man in front, frantically walking the sidewalk and searching the ground, his face, twisted up as he looks. With the dim lighting of the street lamps, his arms motion in great, wide circles, their arcing shadows strong on the concrete. As I walk by, he asks me if I’ve seen his bag. I answer with an automatic “no” and continue without breaking stride, a response developed after years in the city.

The mindless, rhythmic pattern of putting foot in front of foot is usually enough to lull me into a soporific state, but I’m kept irritated and awake by something uncertain that keeps popping into my head.

Mary is a good model. Not the kind that displays expensive dresses for fashionable people because she makes them look good, but the kind that displays the human form for us ugly artists because she makes it look dynamic. I suppose she may be considered good-looking, but there is a definite stark tone of her body that displays bones and muscle groups well. It's not what most people would consider beautiful, although I used to. The important thing is that I have drawn a thousand fast sketches of her, but the last hundred all look alike. Except for the ink wash she saw tonight. I just can't place how it's different.

By the time I've figured this out, I'm at the turn-around point in my walk. It's the largest tree in the neighborhood, standing tall and ugly in an empty lot in-between buildings and decorated with broken glass and the occasional syringe jabbed into its massive trunk. Somehow, it stays alive in this place, in spite of the city. It survives, but it doesn't grow.

The ink image still floats in my mind’s eye, even as I loop my path around the tree and back towards home. Her head is turned to the side, her torso is twisted around. It has a dark gray tone, almost blending into the neutral pad. It is one of the only recent drawings of her that I can call up from memory individually. The rest only appear in bunches: crouching, three-quarters’ view, mid-stride. No matter how I examine her action, there’s no reason why this one was different, and the mental effort does indeed make me sleepy.

Passing by Herb’s Meats again, I see the homeless man, now lying up against the wall of the store, asleep and resting his head on a Crown Royal bag filled with papers. His body is twisted slightly, lying half on his back and ribcage, while his head is turned down towards the chest in a gentle bow. The skin of his face is worn and weather-beaten, but his eyes and mouth are curled into a subtly relaxed smile, and his breath is calm and even. I'm surprised by how I envy his relaxed position in this warm night, even when surrounded by the smell of the store. Within four minutes, I am back home and asleep, turning on my sheets and resting my head on my sketchbook.

I trade away most of my morning and afternoon for a paycheck. I fishtail my massive car around town, delivering gluttonous amounts of food for restaurants. Everything from foul sloppy joes that leak through their bags to kung pao chicken fragrant with MSG. These messes of meals go to people who inevitably insult me with tips under fifteen percent. But I keep moving and delivering, making up for lousy tips by getting lots of them. I’ve only had the job for a short time, but I don’t plan on keeping it for long.

Around four o’clock, I find myself waiting on the nice side of town for my next order to deliver. It's been a slow day, and my feet are currently propped up onto the dashboard while I'm making a rough sketch of a stray cat on the other side of the street. Just as I’m about to start my third page of images, I hear my name. Not over the dispatch radio, but being called in real life, by Mary.

She’s leaning out of a second floor apartment window in a decent brick building, and waving at me. She yells something about being in the area and meeting me in the apartment lobby, so I close my sketchbook and go inside. After a few moments, she steps out of the stairwell. It’s been a while since I saw Mary in a setting that didn’t involve her posing for a piece, and I’ve forgotten how much energy she can put into any action, even ones as sedate as sipping a cup of tea or flipping the page of a book. When she talks, her emphasis makes her speech sharp and direct.

“You are coming to the party tonight, right?” I can feel the tone resonate in her voice. She's mostly teasing me, but she may not be entirely sure, so I nod an agreement. Reassured, she takes the edge out of her voice, an effect much like removing the razor blade from the inside of an apple.

“Slow day, I take it?” She points at the radio hanging from my belt, and I nod. There is a moment where two less familiar friends might have vaguely witty banter, but we simply stand there, nearly every conversation we could have has happened before, with one result or another.

Eventually, she asks, “Should we meet up before the party, when you get off of work?” I nearly nod to this as well, but think better of it. I prefer to show up later to parties. Time it right, and I show up after attendants are trying to talk to new people, but before they're drunk enough to be a bother.

"I need to unpack at home", I tell her. We both know it's a terrible excuse, but it could possibly be true. It's better than saying, "I want to draw your friends, not meet them." It shows I care enough to lie, and that's enough for her.

The radio crackles a bit and I am told that I need to pick up a cold cut sub from Herb’s Meats for delivery. It reminds me of the one question I want to ask. So, like a clumsy pollster, I inquire, “By the way, what was it about that ink wash last night that you liked so much?”

Mary doesn't have to think about her response, no doubt she has long since planned out her answer. “You actually saw me as you created that image, instead of rushing out just another sketch of what you knew I looked like.” She doesn’t give me time for it to set in before she walks back to the stairwell. "See you at the party," she says, leaving me standing in the lobby, looking confused.

Mary’s always known me pretty well, and sometimes it’s because of this knowledge that I’m able to judge myself. After all, how can you recognize motion if you don’t have a constant point for comparison?

It comes down to this: some people hate to stand still, which is what I like about them. They’re always walking, moving, stretching. I express them in my sketchbook with bold, strong lines. It takes effort to make them stationary on paper, but their liveliness is forever preserved in their motions. Heads turned to the side. Legs bent while running. Bodies twisted in action.

At the moment, I am not standing still, either. My powerful car speeds down the winding road towards the dance. There will be plenty of motion there. Blurs of trees and rocks rush by my sides, animated as I speed past them over the limit, but my box-shaped vehicle is the only thing that’s really moving on this road. The sketchbook resides in the passenger’s seat, sliding to each side while I skid left or right. The sooner I get there, the more I'll fill the book.

When I draw, my hand scratches across the page wildly, leaving a trail that captures the gesture of the subject. My hand never stops; it is busy conveying the energy to the drawing. If my hand hit something, it would ruin the flow of the entire piece. This last thought occurs to me as my car slides across the road at the next turn. It hits a tree, which doesn’t move at all.

The moment of the crash is trapped in time, and I am forced to watch it and examine it closely. For a moment, the sides of my car are made of silver shark scales, rippling with tensed power and trying to flow around the massive oak. The glass becomes a panorama of jagged teeth, voraciously tearing into the obstacle in front of them. When the metal stops complaining and my body is pressed against the airbag and seatbelt, I hear a slow waltz over the radio. Time begins to pass again, during which I carefully notice every way that the car has shattered. Eventually, I pick up my sketchbook with a bleeding hand, and try to crawl past the airbag and out the ruined window.

Once outside, I have trouble seeing that it was my car; it is more of a crumpled bag, a drowned shark planted at a turn in the road. It is shamefully static.

Sitting on the other side of the road in a mild state of shock, waiting for a passing motorist, I notice something in the form of my ex-car. The warped core, unnatural for an automobile, intrigues me, makes me begin to look. For ten minutes, I simply look at the remains. I've never seen anything to compare it with, and I begin to create it in my sketchbook. I am so busy capturing its interrupted dance that I miss the next three people on the road. When I run out of lead in the crushed pencil, I use the end of an ink brush with the sanguine toner that is leaking from my hand. I see it all and record it carefully, not just the power. Headlights turned to the side. Wheels bent. Frame twisted in crashing.

I'll make it to the party. When I get there, I may even sit in the corner and sketch people’s dancing. I may dance, maybe even with Mary, if she asks. But I won’t need to keep moving. I’ll just see.