AJ Alanson Author

We stand on the shoulders of giants – heckling, ribbing, needling giants. Anyway, I seem to. With our daughter in Germany for a year, I wanted to do something for her host family to commemorate that one Christmas when our families were improbably linked. She and I racked our brains and finally came up the idea for me to sketch a little watercolor of a photo taken from her surroundings.

Now, this is a tall order because while I sculpt in about anything, paint (oil), sketch in graphite and pastels, I don’t DO watercolor. If you had the pleasure, everyday, of walking a kilometer to and from school in rural Southwest Germany, through medieval mists and tiny villages, over winding gravel roads, past vineyards and crop fields at sunrise and sunset, well, every single photo of yours would also look like a water color. It just HAD to be a watercolor.

So, there’s a story about that, a story of three professors in my arts college: one nasty (probably because his best works, if any, were far behind him), one sarcastic as f*&# (and a freakin’ God of watercolor), and one deeply depressed (likely because he cared too much). I awoke one Christmas morning – wait, that’s been done – okay, I’m a poor student looking to combine a mathematics major with a fine art major in the needlessly complicated world of left-brain/right-brain division (yes, once upon a time, academia believed one could not do both – especially women, but that’s for another tale). There, in the art department, I met three specters.

Okay, so, it’s a small college, but the point is, I was pretty competent at anything they threw at me and I mean, these three threw every imaginable art media at me, from basket weaving to print making, stained glass to dada sculpture – for which I got good marks for drying out a McDonalds’ meal and making a mobile with French fries for the chimes and the burger as the clapper. I called it the “Break Wind Chime.”

But I digress.

And so it came to pass that in my fourth year, I had, at last, come to sit in Richard’s class, and there, in front of such a master, my eyes alight with awe and wonder, armed with years of knowledge plundered, I would, alas, be put asunder with that which I could not render. For though my journey nearly ended, aft praise and grades and awards granted, I met my nemesis in the random of wicking papers and bleeding edges. And as I, a senior of some renown had, when faced with dainty tints and untouched ground, before that thing, that one thing found, had decisively fallen.

While my classmates, in past, tormented by my successes reveled in the shame they witnessed, worse was Dick’s overacted shock, giggling as he mercilessly mocked his prized pupil’s, his rising star’s precipitous demise.

Okay, I can only keep that up for so long but you get the point, which to say, everyone enjoyed a laugh at my expense but it must be said in my defenses, while yet possessed by ghosts of rhyming, I declare my failure in this maddening media was not but timing. For as we began great works of fruit, moved on to skulls of cow and squirrel, then progressed to hanging shirts, and midway attacked pastoral expanses (all subjects in which I found little interest and even less charm), it happened that only when, at the class’s very end, and much to my cocky colleagues’ chagrin, Dick brought a living, breathing model in. Perhaps to test his theory of me.

Alas, as others slopped and dripped while from their hands strange bugs and aliens slipped, as choked and broken brushes fell from grip, finally, for me, the human came alive. Redeemed, yes, but the torment stuck, when faced with watercolor, to this day I only test my luck with skepticism and a lot of pluck, and I humbly beg to perch atop his shoulder from time to time, to draw my pigments and let them flow, each his quips, his jabs, his goads, still whisper in my ears whilst with regards to shoulders, he sits on mine.

Which is to say, with every wet stroke, Richard Dubois, God rest his soul, is with me as the colors flow. (P.S. I believe he would approve…not of the painting, but of the poem.) Happy Holidays! A Wolf in the Cove will be out any day. I’ll keep you posted.