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A few days ago I told my beloved friend Vie Dunn Harr that I believe I have finally learned how to paint. She asked if it had something to do with my brushstrokes.  (It didn’t occur to me at the time, but I wonder now if she was commenting on the awkwardness of my paint application!)

No, it is not my brushstrokes; it will likely never be my brushstrokes. I don’t have a pretty hand, and have never had one. My lowest grade in school was always penmanship. I so envy the kids of today who don’t have to worry about that. One marking period I worked especially hard to improve my handwriting, and got the worst grade ever. In fact, I can’t think of anything about any of my physical movements that could be called graceful. I was so uncoordinated in basketball that I was accused in gym class of messing up on purpose.

During the year he served at Princeton as Artist in Residence, Esteban Vicente criticized one of my drawings as “too facile.” He must have meant “too careless,” because these was nothing both facile and competent about anything I made.

I just have to work hard, and make sure there is more to my work than expert facility.

Is it possible for work that is not pretty to be beautiful? Are there things in your life that are beautiful yet defective in grace?

Halfway through my sophomore year as a potential math major I dropped out of Princeton, bursting with the art spirit. I asked my father to send me to art school but he was emphatic: it was back to Princeton, where there was no studio art program, or nothing. After a year working in a design studio I went back, but this time as a philosophy major. I wasn’t happy and I was unable to get an art career off the ground, but I do see the wealth that my education in philosophy has contributed to my life. Not financially, though.

Would I have learned proficiency and grace at the Pennsylvania Academy? Well, I might have gotten to my present level at an earlier age, but maybe not. I’m still awkward and can’t see how any training could have remedied that. Nor did I learn anything specific as a philosophy major that influences my art production today, and I disagree with much of the thought that was favored back then. But maybe, just maybe, I did learn careful attention to thought there.

And that’s how I got to the point where today I can claim that, just possibly, I have finally learned to paint.

Over the years friends have assured me, “Oh George, you already know how to paint.” I tried to explain, but then they said, “You are too harsh a critic on yourself.”

No. Not true. Because here I am telling friends and loved ones that I am finally getting it, but I have not become a gentler critic. I have actually arrived in the neighborhood of the place toward which I have been aiming, and my harsh critic is happy about it.

I am basing that claim on only two paintings and the sudden realization of how I want to improve some of my earlier, salvageable works. But I can’t promise that their execution will be pretty.

We’ll see.

Meantime, this discussion is not over.