Kat

- by Robert McGowan

Talent is essential, but it isn’t everything.

Which is to say:
You can’t get there without talent,
but you can have talent
and
still
not
get
there.

A venerable truth anciently understood, no new insight of mine, cutesy typography aside.

But for some it can be a shocking-fresh fact, hard to work through.

Kat, for example.

Who has as yet only the flimsiest inkling how immense, how punishing is the work required to make talent live.

Kat is short for Katarzyna and for good reason: who wants to hear Huh? every time she says her name? It’s Polish, she told me, and has something to do with purity, as in chastity, which in Kat’s case, based on what I know of her, would not very much obtain. But then certain customary notions of purity are bullshit anyway. Kat is an adventurer. As is every other artist in one way or another, the great ones and the less great, even the far less great. Explorers of experience.

And also eschewers of plebeian convention: Kat dresses and ornaments herself in her own oddball way, spends time as she pleases with whatever oddballs she hankers to spend it with, thinks her own inventive thoughts her own oddball way, articulating them without restraint whenever wherever, and she displays on her old sad-sack Toyota the requisite bevy of progressive bumper stickers, some of their arcane messages indecipherable to the unsavvy, which of course is the intention. She exhibits all the obligatory hip-young-artist earmarks. All the, in point of fact, conventions.

She does have talent, no question. Of a kind. She’s had me to her living-room studio up the block to see her work. Her painting is frolicsome and confident and fluid. Lively. She’s adroit. A natural draftsman, an innately deft paint handler.

But she’s naive. She might even be shallow. She wants making art to be fun.

Which is a common youthful mistake: the notion that creativity if present need only be allowed to flow undirected, by which joyful process will be obtained its most profound expression

If only it were so.

The fun Kat takes in making her paintings is immediately apparent to the viewer of them. They veritably gush frolic. But I regret they reveal also a yawning absence of purpose. She has no idea why she’s painting the way she’s painting, why she’s painting at all. She has no objective.

And apparently doesn’t wish to be burdened by one. Kat had been drawing and painting all her adult life – if she’s had one yet; she’s only twenty-four – but a short while ago she began taking art courses. Right away however she had complaints: her teachers were telling her to think more. “They’re after me to get into all kinds of soul-searching and all – self-analysis. It’s suffocating!” So she put art school behind her.

A few weeks after she made that decision, Kat told me something one of her teacher’s had said to her, seeking no doubt, as a good teacher would, to open her eyes: “There’s a greater talent than just knowing how to wield a charcoal stick and a paint brush. That kind of talent, which is merely skill, is only the tool of expression. If you’re going to get anywhere,” she remembered his saying, “you have to understand that skill exists to serve idea.”

She said she’d been wondering what exactly her teacher had meant when he spoke of getting somewhere. I told her that everything in art is nebulous, that in few other fields of endeavor is meaning less precise, but I told her I was sure he was speaking of the effort to create work of expressive weight.

“. . . weight,” she muttered.

“Or depth, you might say.”

Clearly the issue had deflated her.

She asked me – not defensively but thoughtfully, like a grown-up – why she should care about getting somewhere. I told her she didn’t have to. I told her I wasn’t sure it mattered whether she cared about that or not, and I actually meant it, because in truth I’m not sure. But I told her also that once you’ve seen into an issue, once you’ve seen beyond what you’d seen before, you’ve got a real problem. Innocence once lost is gone forever, I told her. Which is true, however melodramatically I’d flavored it.

But after a little time, Kat seemed actually to have sloughed it off, the whole tangled, bothersome business about expressive weight and depth and getting somewhere. She didn’t seem entirely as jaunty now about her painting as she’d been before her wake-up dip into art school, but she’d proven remarkably capable of resuming at least the core temper of her former carefree disposition toward it. She was once again slopping paint on canvas with as much verve - and with as little cerebral involvement - as ever.

I wonder whether Kat has experienced any ongoing residual unease following her brief distracting brush with the notion that it’s important to have some idea what the hell you’re doing. I’ve sometimes sensed in her a tinge of embarrassment, as though she feels she simply isn’t up to grappling with so daunting a commitment, or fears anyway that I think she isn’t, which I suppose I do.

But which doesn’t matter.

What I think is that Kat would be capable of committing to something if she wanted to commit to it but that, for her, for now, what she wants to commit to is painting for fun. No contrived intentions, no rationalizations, no excuses, no apologies.

Katarzyna the pure.

“Kat” is one part of Robert McGowan’s unpublished novel, Suites, a Novel in Thirty-six Separate Parts, Some Funny, Some Sad. McGowan’s fiction, personal essay, and art criticism have appeared or are forthcoming in prominent literary, nature, and art journals. His story “A Scar From a Fall,” based on his 1969 Vietnam War experience, is forthcoming this fall in the literary journal Blue Mesa Review. He lives in midtown Memphis.