Living Life Outside the Lines
I’ve been visiting all kinds of museums while living in Tokyo.
One was the home of a sculptor. While his statues were impressive, I stood for I don’t know how long at his bedroom window, staring out at the pond he had built in the heart of his home.
Koi.
Stone.
Fountain.
Moss.
Wind.
In a different museum: sword, scroll, fan.
A Van Gogh and a Miro transfixed me in the Museum of Western Art.
Something else that captured my attention there was a small exhibit on “underdrawings,” or preliminary sketches an artist might make on a canvas before painting. Once the piece is completed, these lines usually become invisible to the naked eye.
Infrared light unearths these hidden underdrawings.
In the exhibit, the painting and a photo of its underdrawing sit side by side. The finished painting comes first. Since these were all religious paintings, they pulsate with that living red and the electric blue I always associate with the Virgin Mary.
Then come the black and white underdrawings. Original ideas. Scribbled plans. Changes. Mistakes. Erasures. New directions.
Looking at them is almost like reading an artist’s diary (or my diary, if I’m being honest). The one that gets kept locked and hidden underneath the mattress so no one can see.
It didn’t take much of a leap for me to look at the underdrawings and think about how we all have underdrawings, or in our cases understories, that we have lived.
And often no one knows they are there.
One of the quietest people I know used to perform in a circus.
One of the strictest fathers I know was the biggest partier.
I knew an old woman who flew a B-52 in WWII. At the time I was friends with her, she would sit and knit as her cobbler bubbled in the oven. And she probably had seven or eight other lives between the war and when I knew her.
We all have layers upon layers of lives that most people don’t see.
Painting has a term for this: pentimenti. It refers to the layers that build up in a painting. As the placard next to one of the underdrawings said, “these layers eloquently recount the development process.”
What is life but pentimenti, our own layers building up in our own process of becoming, for haven’t we all changed multiple times?
Didn’t we all have original plans with our lives—and isn’t it almost laughable how far we have strayed from what we thought we were going to do and be?
Haven’t we all experienced changes, erasures?
Don’t our own lives reveal the trial and error process?
Or at least they could, if we would dare to be real and let others see us try and fail and get back up and try again.
The exhibit also said that sometimes, the underdrawing is done by applying “fluid materials” to the canvas. What would life look like if we brought “fluid materials” to the blank canvas of every new day?
We could bring intentions, sure, but also a wonderful ability to meet and change and shape what is. If we did that, what dynamic and deliciously strange version of ourselves might we become?
Because that’s something else I’ve learned in all these museums. I ignore all the paintings of blue skies and pretty flowers. Give me something Real! my spirit cries. Even if it’s messy and I can’t quite make sense of it.
In that sculptor’s house, the thing I literally knelt before was the bronze head of a lion sitting on a low table. With my knees on the soft tatami floor and my eyes on the creation before me, I knew this wasn’t your normal, “mighty” lion. Its face was etched with lines of grief and pain.
Why? The question bubbled up in me as I knelt there. Why does suffering seem to be a prerequisite of being alive? Why does it have to be a layer in all our understories?
I don’t know.
That might not seem like much of an answer, especially in the face of almost unspeakable pain and tragedy. But it’s the truest answer I can give.
While we can’t always make sense of the big, the mysterious, the heartbreaking, one of the things art does best is to invite us to feel the beautiful, terrible mess of it all. And it helps us to know: we are not alone.
From there, we can make choices. What new layers might we choose to add today? And the today after that? And maybe even more importantly, how might we finally move ourselves and live outside the lines?
I, for one, can’t wait to find out.
Live light and shine.
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