After Picasso

Like a 1960s version of Tom Sawyer, my big brother got me to purple-wash the beige walls of our parents’ former conjugal quarters. Our dad had moved out of the house and our mom had turned the den into her new bedroom.

It was a bittersweet task, turning the bride and groom's bedroom of twenty-five years into an art studio. The twilight-coloured walls were an attempt to erase that particular quarter century while also making way for a new blacklight.

I was a skinny girl of fourteen, limbs flying loose from oversized wooly sweaters (my brother’s) and skirts rolled up at the waist to create the mini-est of miniskirts. Legs dancing and leaping, I was just as free as all those answers blowin’ in the wind Bob Dylan kept singing about.

But when the school buzzer sounded its mechanical call I stifled the wild child and filed into the drab hallways and classrooms of my high school, an institution where I was about as far from free as my hem was from the grey linoleum floors.

Forced to sit still in a little prison they called a desk I clenched my fists and dug my nails into the palms of my hands in an attempt to quell my youthful energy. I sought salvation in daydreams, as a voice droned on while writing algebraic equations on the blackboard. If I was called upon to answer a question, I had to confess I hadn’t been listening; I didn’t know the answers - they were blowing in the wind.

What is the square root of FREE?

When I wasn’t trapped in the classroom, I could be found performing vignettes behind strip malls and in bandstands with my friends. We wore Mod clothes and committed fanciful acts in sleepy suburbia, dancing on garage roofs and playing invisible tennis in empty courts. We recited Leonard Cohen poems in abandoned buildings.

To break the boredom in class I created small theatrical events, pushing the envelope just enough to not get sent to the principal. For instance, when I had to sneeze, I covered my nose then made the loudest “aaa-choo” you ever heard, causing kids to laugh and teachers to scowl - except for my English teacher. He encouraged such bold self-expression.

“Bravo!” he’d say after one of my volcanic sneezes punctured the pen-scratching soundtrack of his classroom.

He was also an art teacher, although not mine, and when he found out how much I liked to paint, he lent me a big book full of plates of great artworks. I didn’t open it for a week or more. I had homework and meet-ups with my dad at the International House of Pancakes, not to mention quoting Cohen, dancing to The Beatles and trying to figure out my future.

On the closet door that used to hold our father’s tie rack, my brother painted some Day-glo hearts. In one he wrote "Sonny and Cher" and in another I put "Mom and Dad". Since our parent's marriage had ended in nasty betrayals and terrible battles, this neon-blue inscription made us smile ironically beneath the blacklight, glowing teeth concealing pain, confusion, fear.

One lazy Saturday, I finally opened my teacher’s book and was instantly mesmerized by all the stunning reproductions. I took the book into our art studio and opened the curtains to allow in plenty of light. Then I chose a canvas board and began to paint.

With a kind of ecstatic concentration, I endeavoured to mix the same blues Picasso had once mixed. I squeezed the delicious, oozy colours from their tubes onto the palette, swirling and blending them with my brush.

Spring green, tar black, cherry red.

The smell of the oil paints as I slathered them onto the canvas was as fragrant to me as the hyacinths that grew in our rockery. Every day after school, I rushed home to my very own Girl before a Mirror in progress.

One day, while poised before the easel in breathless abandon, a little blob of turquoise paint landed on my teacher's book, right next to the Girl. Not a fan of the wrath of authority figures, I hurried to wipe it off. But the pigment had seeped in and left a vivid blue stain on a border that was otherwise as white as virgin snow. I had deflowered the Girl, and the repercussions I imagined for this clumsy mistake gave me nightmares.

A few weeks later, my masterpiece was done. I took it to school to show my teacher. Appraising the 2' x 3' canvas, he smiled thoughtfully, and in a voice full of warm approval, said: “Call it ‘After Picasso’ and enter it in the school art show.”

Quivering in my white go-go boots, I then opened his book to the blue blemish and apologized. He studied the blotch with the same critical eye he’d given my painting. It seemed an eternity before he looked up at me.

“I am honoured,” he said, and I stopped quivering.

My painting placed second in the art show and I was awarded an artists' sketchbook. That pad made me feel like a real artist not just some sad-sack child-of-divorce pretending at something.

When I finally saw the original Girl before a Mirror at MOMA, I stood before it - magnificent and vibrant - and became intensely aware of the Girl’s face: One side is a soft lavender-pink, the innocent child; the other side is bright yellow accented with rouge, lipstick, and eye shadow, the emerging sexual woman.

I understood then that I had painted a self portrait.

I also understood that Picasso and his Girl had opened my eyes to the healing powers of art and that in art, and also in life, "mistakes", might not be mistakes at all.

In fact, they might even be honourable.