Story time: Old School edition!

Note: This is a repost. I wrote the original for an old blog of mine in Jan 2020. Since that’s no longer available, I decided to kick off this new blog by reposting here.

I’m pretty sure this is the oldest piece of my own art I still have (maybe the oldest still in existence) & there’s a kind of shitty Manda storytime behind it.

When I was 17, it was necessary for me to go into inpatient psychiatric care. The closest adolescent ward with an open bed was about 3 hours away; not a desirable situation for a clinically depressed teen to have her peer support system so far away, so the local public hospital got special permission to admit me to their adult ward. Because I’ve always been an art geek, all I wanted to do while reflecting upon my inner demons day in and day out was to create. Their art supplies were sparse and I had an awesome and supportive doctor (RIP Dr. Chernoff, you literally saved my life), so my parents took one of my paychecks and bought out the fine art supply aisle of AC Moore.

It’s worth noting that: 

A.) I was the youngest patient on the ward by far; 

B.) I was the only artsy patient at the time; 

C.) the ward doubled as addiction detox and psychiatry: 

As a result, I became something of the darling of the ward while I was there. Almost all the other patients wanted my attention in some way, usually fawning over my art (which even at the time I knew wasn’t good, but this ended up being the only positive artistic encouragement I got my entire senior year of high school) and almost all of them were pretty protective of me. This lady fell in the first category, but not the second.

I don’t know why she was there. I was a kind of shitty teenager (as teens often are) going through a mental health crisis, and the specifics are fuzzy, but I remember I just didn’t care for her. I had been drawing all my fellow patients for lack of other subject matter and often giving them their portraits as thanks for the practice (I was a fairly terrible portrait artist at the time). She had been hounding and hounding me for “her turn.” I dodged her as much as I could, but finally she managed to corner me one afternoon when I didn’t have a therapy appointment to bail me out.

She was obsessed with her nails. I guess she’s gotten them done recently? There’s a lot of specifics that are fuzzy. They were long, they really were that color orange, and she insisted several times I make sure to get them in. She actually took that pose because she wanted a picture of her nails more than she wanted a picture of her face. Her nails were…not my style, to put it nicely.

Again, I was a shitty teen with an acute mental health crisis. And I didn’t like her. And I resented being forced to draw her and her unattractive nails. So, I did a rushed blind contour – that is, I did a line drawing instead of a thorough sketch, without looking at the paper as I drew. I then colored the line drawing like a coloring book, in blocky colors with very little blending. In oil pastel, because I hated (and still do) oil pastels.

Let’s just say, thank you mood altering medications and vigilant staff in the common area. She HATED it. Really, really hated it. I kinda realized what a shitty thing it was to do after I did it and meekly apologized and tried to explain I was experimenting, but she was low key pissed. She stomped off with a dirty look and refused to take it. Incidentally, my roommate thought it was hilarious (the drawing and the situation). 

Personally, I always loved it. The distortion turns away from vanity and makes it slightly more mysterious I think. She’s not showing off her nails anymore, she almost looks like she’s peeking out from behind her hands, or lifting her face up from a double face palm.

Here we are nearly 17 years later with this portrait still following me. A reminder to be kind but take no shit that makes me giggle and makes me feel a little bad at the same time. I’ve sifted and purged old art work several times since I drew this, more so since becoming more minimalist. I’ve lost things I treasured during moves. But this has stuck with me, literally and metaphorically.