Portrait in Felt-Tipped Marker on Melamine

A friend texted an image of a drawing with this question: “Guess how old the student is who drew this?” Knowing that my friend teaches elementary school, the answer could only be under twelve. Because the question had an aura of excitement to it, closer to kindergarten than to Grade Seven. But I’m a good sport, so I took a second look. 

My first thought was, I’ve got a secret, and I wondered how old I was when the sensation first occurred to me. No answers. I returned to the image and saw not a withholding figure but a coy one: a woman as young as fourteen, no longer before a neutral (white) background but entering a schoolyard, on her way to homeroom, or walking down the halls between classes, or maybe stepping from the bathroom at a house party …

 

Embarrassed by my imagination, I turned away from the image, only to return to it sheepishly, to take in its lines. The dominant lines are those that form the sides and jaw of the figure’s face, her cocked grin, her eyes. Indeed, it is the eyes that allow the other lines their contribution, empowering them, enlisting them as co-conspirators. But wait, these are not the heavy-lidded downcast eyes I thought they were; these eyes contain vertical lines, what I see now as colourless irises, making them wide-eyed and looking to our left. Suddenly, this is no longer the drawing I thought it was, but the drawing I want it to be. 

 

“10,” I text my friend.

 

“Try 5,” was her reply.

 

It is said that only children are innocent enough to convey the truth through their art, and this is taken as a virtue. By the same token, it is also said (by art critics like me) that anybody can accidentally take a resonant photograph or make a great drawing; the question is, Was it intended? Was it composed with deliberation? Here’s a few more: Is there another truth that exists between Innocence and Accidents? Is the truth not what goes on in the mind of the beholder? A truth that results not from the narrative conveyed by the image under review, but the narratives society has embedded within us? 

 

My response to the image is this writing -- my acknowledgement of where it came from, my encounter with it and my incorrect guess at the age of its artist. In reading back on what I have written, I realize I would have had a better chance at being right about the age of the artist had I not looked at the image, studied it, drawn my own conclusions. The person who drew this drawing is five; the critic, twelve times that. Five times twelve is sixty: old enough to know that I would rather be wrong in guessing, than right about what I think I am missing.