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I felt a bit scared.
“It is?”
I looked back at my illustration.
A Neo-Gothic manor perched upon a hill, the terrain imbuing it with romance beneath the unforgiving sky. A single light was on in an upstairs window. It had been rendered with Pilot pens first, and then I had colored it in, where needed, with India ink and a quill to add depth and layers.
“Do I look like a dragon?” Professor Hernandez inquired, a stern look replacing his previously rapt features.
“No, sir,” I stammered.
“Good. Because I am not in the habit of blowing smoke. A couple of my friends do occasionally, but not my good self,” he smiled.
“Okay,” I said, unsure of what I was supposed to be saying to that little speech of his.
“Almost anyone can learn technique. That’s not special; that is not art. Left to itself, such things are mechanical. Soulless. They have no heart. Do you understand?”
I nodded uneasily.
“Miss O’Connell, do you know what makes art?”
“Talent?” I tried, the word forming uneasily on my lips.
He frowned in concentration, staring intently at my drawing. He pursed his lips and blew out a breath. It smelled slightly of cinnamon.
“Partly,” he said, surrendering. “It cannot be denied. Warhol could brush and stroke canvas so neatly there were no brush strokes. That is a skill, you know.”
“I do,” I admitted.
He stepped back, waving his arms expansively, including the rest of the class in our conversation suddenly. They all looked at me as if I had three heads.
“What makes an artist, as opposed to an artisan, is vision!” he almost shouted.
Everyone nodded along, but it was clear that most were as confused as I was about what was going on.
“A clear idea of what you want to do,” he continued. “Not what you think you should do, or what others want you to do. Talent helps you bring it out, certainly, but an artist needs vision! And, Miss O’Connell, you most surely possess it.”
I could see his point. It wasn’t even about originality of vision, which was my first thought.
Monet literally painted landscapes, but uniquely. He followed his own passion, which was why he was considered a genius decades after his death.
“Thank you, Professor Hernandez,” I said, blushing.
“It’s Eduardo. Miss O’Connell, if you ever need a letter of reference, please ask,” he said.
“I will.”
Then he bowed, with a flourish, and continued on his way, leaving me with a warm, glowing feeling.
I could hear him admonishing Jake, but it was far away, as if the entire world had receded from me.
“Composition, Mr. Anderson! For the love of His Noodley Appendage, have you no sense of depth perception!” he intoned distantly.
A flush of warmth washed over me again. I’d wanted to be an artist since I first discovered my mom’s stash of original Edward Gorey books when I was ten. Nearly a decade of desire was a long time.
Thank goodness mom saw the ad for an illustrator that was posted by DreamTime Publishing. A summer internship soon turned into a paying job as a junior illustrator.
The editors assured me they could hire me full time after I graduated. Truly sweet and wonderful people, they didn’t want to overburden me while I was still in school.
“Right. Put your tools down, everyone. The moment of truth has arrived,” Professor. Hernandez commanded.
He placed a pile of our classwork on a desk. A tower, like fate standing tall, was on his table, with a long and weathered, possibly wooden, thing standing to one side of it, safe from most of the action, much of which involved power-tools.
One by one, he distributed to us our futures. He barely moved the muscles of his face, his expression inscrutable. He placed slips of paper with our grades on them into our hands, upside-down, to hide the results of last week’s assignment.
After one more painfully intense moment, he was finally in front of me.
I scrabbled my grade from his grasp and retreated to my table.
I flipped it over and scanned it for his judgement: A-.
My shoulders sagged with relief. I could work with that. Literally and figuratively. Not the perfect score my dad always argued I deserved, but well above average.
More than enough to confirm my suspicions.
I still had some things to learn, but it would only get better. I was already good enough to go pro!
The fact they’d basically already hired me at DreamTime should have been a clue, but I’d harbored suspicions that they were just being polite, not in the least because of my father’s fearsome reputation and sharp legal mind.
There were few who didn’t know Ken O’Connell, Esquire, and those who did usually cowered in fear. Even me, occasionally, to be honest. And he’d never hurt a single hair on my head.
It was more his force of personality, which could show up on weather satellites if he wasn’t being careful.
