All the beautiful things

Being an artist and an art student is an interesting experience. You go to classes where they teach you about how ideas about what art Should be have changed over the centuries and how it will continue to change. They teach you about how the only way to ever be noticed or admired or known is to push the boundaries and be different and that if you go back to the old ways or the classical style, you'll never be considered a true artist because a true artist has the original idea and without that, you'll just be a copier. You go to classes where they teach you specific ways to paint and specific ways to draw. You go to classes where they say that (unless you are so intent and so committed to being an artist) you should just stop right there and find something else to do with your life. You go to lectures of visiting artists who have traveled the world and think they know everything there is to know about being an artist and listen to them tell you that it's too hard and too disappointing to be an artist unless you are as committed and intent as we've been taught to be. You walk the halls and see the displayed art of other students with other professors and art of other students with the same professors and wonder why they chose to paint what they did and wonder why they decided to draw what they did. You go back to your art history class and watch a movie made in the 50's about Jackson Pollock and wonder what they were thinking in choosing the music they did to go with the film. You stand in your painting class trying so hard to depict the thing sitting in front of you by forgetting that it's an object and think of it instead as just shapes even though it looks worse when you do. You go home every night in clay covered jeans and paint in your hair and and wonder why people at the store on the way home look at you funny. You go to work looking the same way because you have to go straight there after class because you don't have time to go home and change and you wonder why the kids you work with even listen to you when you have the green stripe in your hair and blue paint in your cuticles. You smile when you realize you come home just as dirty as your mechanic husband. You stand in line at the post office and ask for the Botticelli stamps while the guy behind you laughs for who knows what reason and just think you like Botticelli and his dang Annunciation paintings. Then realize when you get home that your husband probably won't appreciate the stamps he'll have to put on his mail. But brush it off because he knew he was marrying an artist when he sat through three movies in a row while you were engaged just so you could finish a painting for class the next day. Then you wonder after that last thought if you really are an artist. You wonder if you are as committed as they say you have to be. You try and remind yourself of all the reasons you're doing it in the first place and sassily mutter under your breath that anyone who disagrees can go sit on .... your cardboard and wood glue throne.