Some strive for glory. Others for riches. There are those who, from the moment they hit the cradle have an unquenchable thirst for greatness. Each hour of every day that follows is devoted to being the best at whatever it is they have elected to dedicate their lives to. Not me, though. I have long realized that I am destined not to be best at anything. Or, if I am, it will be in an area so hopelessly specialized that no one else will be interested. Say what you will, but being the World Champion of cutlery sorting (dishwasher division) is not all it’s cracked up to be. But if I can’t be the best at anything, or at least anything important, I’m a good chance of being the worst.
Some strive for glory. Others for riches. There are those who, from the moment they hit the cradle have an unquenchable thirst for greatness. Each hour of every day that follows is devoted to being the best at whatever it is they have elected to dedicate their lives to. Not me, though. I have long realized that I am destined not to be best at anything. Or, if I am, it will be in an area so hopelessly specialized that no one else will be interested. Say what you will, but being the World Champion of cutlery sorting (dishwasher division) is not all it’s cracked up to be. But if I can’t be the best at anything, or at least anything important, I’m a good chance of being the worst.
There are many fields in which I excel at being useless. In his masterpiece, ‘The Picture of Dorian Gray’, Oscar Wilde states that ‘All art is quite useless.’ I, on the other hand, was quite useless at art. It’s not really the same thing, I realize, but by referring to someone who was unarguably a genius (he even said so himself), I’m hoping a little of that reflected glory might bounce my way. At our school, art class was compulsory until year 10. Even so, my attempts were so execrable that I was excused and allowed to spend double period on Wednesday afternoons doing music theory. By myself. In an unlit room. Not that I was much good at music theory, either. More that there was a fear my presence in the classroom might drag others down to my level of ineptitude. Should that even be possible.
It was a strange situation for me. I was used to being lauded for my schoolwork. But this was an area where, despite my best endeavours, I was hopeless. In primary school, I didn’t feel so far behind. But as I grew older and my classmates started producing better and better work, my art skills remained forever stuck at a grade 2 level. Just as Dorian Grey never got any older, the same was true of my art skills.
Not that it was a complete debacle. Certainly, my efforts at life drawing were not such much ‘life’ as ‘undead’. Perhaps I was just before my time. Back then people took an exception to being drawn in a manner that made them look like a member of the zombie army. Even worse than my drawings were my lithographs. As for painting, I wasn’t even allowed to use the brushes. Instead, my moment of shining artistic glory came in the form of an egg.
As I remember it was Easter. Or, at least, I hope it was Easter, otherwise the whole idea of decorating an egg would have been weird, even by art class standards. Apparently we were supposed to make a hole in the top and bottom of the shell and blow out the contents. This was beyond my skill level and, so I reasoned, would leave the shell vulnerable to breakages. So I skipped that part. I figured that an empty egg and one in its natural state look pretty much the same and that no one would be any the wiser. I began by dyeing the whole thing bright red. Suddenly, the object collected by my father on a routine trip to the chook house had been transformed into something of great beauty. Then I got to work. There were lines, circles and different colours. By the end of the double period, it looked like the roof of the Sistine Chapel. Only edible.
My teacher lavished praise on my work, describing it as ‘pretty average’. It was the first time such plaudits had been directed at anything I’d done during art class and I got a little giddy from the acclaim. Sadly, it was only weeks later, after something I’ll refer to as ‘attempted pottery’, that was I invited to spend my time doing something less distracting to others. But in spite of my exile from the artistic mainstream, I kept that egg. In fact, I kept that egg in the top drawer of my bedroom dresser at my father’s house. Which would have been fine had I not moved out at the age of eighteen, leaving both the furniture and, crucially, the egg, behind. Life, as it so often does, moved on and I moved along with it. Years passed and I forgot all about my precious egg, having all but given up the life of an artist.
Although praise like ‘average’ may well last forever, the same could not be said of the egg. After about fifteen years or so, its contents withered and festered to such a degree that the egg finally broke. It unleashed what can only be described as ‘a cloud of stink’, as its fetid spirit was loosed upon the back end of the house. Sometime later, when visiting my father, he informed me of what he described as ‘the incident’. I asked, of course, whether he had been able to salvage any of my work, in response to which he simply raised an eyebrow and answered ‘no’. Thus, all evidence that I was ever average at art was lost.
Maybe the putrid fury of the egg was something of a metaphor for my life as an artist. Ultimately, both the egg and I kind of stank. I have long since retired from decorating eggs. Easter, naturally enough, is the most difficult time of year, but I get by. Worst of all, I’m not sure I did much better at music theory. At least I wasn’t harming any else. All art is, indeed, quite useless. As was I.