Twenty-five years ago, I thought I wanted to be a photographer. I’d taken a photojournalism course in college and found I had a minor visual artistic side I wasn’t aware of. It was surprising, because, to be clear, that visual creativity was, and still is, strictly limited to photography. I cannot draw, or paint, or really visualize anything in my head with anything but words.
In my 20s I began working for an airline as a ramp agent (the guys waving the orange wands who also load your luggage), and with those poverty-level wages came cheap flight benefits. So I traveled, and I took photos. When digital cameras came out, I upgraded my old Pentax and bought one of the first Nikon digital SLRs ever mass produced. It was $1,700, or about 10 percent of my yearly wage at that time—that’s how into photography I was. At one point I even started a business called Overland Photography, selling a few photos here and there but ultimately giving up.
For a time in my mid-30s, this total lack of visual artistic ability bothered me enough that I took an intro to drawing course offered by Minneapolis community education—extremely affordable courses taught by community members in everything from basic electrical (signed up for that) to the art of making sourdough bread (signed up for that, too).
For about 5 weeks I attended an 8-week, 90-min drawing lesson with about a dozen others. We worked on basic skills, and after 5 weeks I had not improved at all. At one point, the instructor had us look at a fork and draw it. And so I had this fork right in front of me, and I stared at it, I concentrated, and then I began to draw. And what I ended up drawing was a one-dimensional fork that looked like a stick-person, except with four legs (tines)—completely useless had it been brought to mass production. Oneida will not be calling.
The instructor at this point had seen my previous work and lack of improvement and reluctantly stopped on her rounds to have a look at my progress. I explained to her—passionately—that I could actually feel the part of my brain responsible for art—the right hemisphere—and it hurt. I put my hand on my head to show her where: I swear, it was a physical sensation of a struggle inside my skull. An entire half of my brain was completely exhausted, confused and in anguish about why it was being put through this kind of torture at this late stage of life. And the instructor said to me, “Some people just can’t draw.” That some person was me.
I skipped the last three classes, knowing I’d tried, and acknowledging that some of us are born with gifts, some of us have to work harder to hone our limited gifts, and some of us better be good at giving gifts to people so they like us, because we aren’t good at other stuff.
Some photos I took when I worked for the airlines. Subscribe to my Substack.
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