I’m Plain Blue & Company

I’m Plain Blue & Company

second year audrey hamm

I looked around, surrounded by slightly unpacked moving boxes, bubble wrap, buckets of paint, canvases and clay. “What am I doing here?”. I found myself saying it out loud, with no one to listen, but perhaps the ghosts of all the artists who’d failed before me. I had gotten the internship, and had the opportunity to present one, new, individual piece in the gallery. I was trying to work on my piece, but I had no idea where to start. 

I rushed out of my freezing apartment the next morning to find some coffee. Warm in my hands, lovely, perfect coffee. The snow flurries swept my hair in front of my face, then back out behind me. My heels clapped the sidewalk just as those businessmen and executives beside me, people characterized by righteousness in timeliness, sincerity in execution. Everything about this place was competitive, and I felt it even looking up at the sky: they must call them skyscrapers for a reason, the buildings pierce through the humble blue and claw their way up for attention.

Back at my apartment, I glanced in my mirror, which was encased in white wooden frame with little sharpie doodles I had done over the years. I realized I barely recognized myself the past few days, bundled with sweaters and mittens. I kept looking, and I saw something, someone I recognized. Those hazel eyes which I always hated as a kid. My never-polished fingernails because I always ended up accidently decorating them with paint or burning them with hot glue. And a necklace, which hung loose around my chest, reminding me exactly how far I have come. 

Everything I have seen or been around the past few days has been new, new, and more new. I had been quick to critique it, quick to feel out of place. As an artist, I have always been accustomed and instructed to make what I saw.

I used to watch out my window at night, listening to the crickets and rustles of the bushes. Now I hear the faint noises of car horns and sirens, fading in and out. Laughs of people making memories and whistles of people trying to find their way. 

“New York, you are not so scary after all, aren’t you?”. I whispered this new information to myself as I gazed over Manhattan, lit up as if it had been sprinkled with gold. Everyone had a reason for being here, a story they were trying to write.

Now, the skyscrapers’ boldness seemed brave, not ignorant, trying to make a name for themselves just like me. The plain blue could use some company anyways.

The next day, I went down to the industrial ports and asked to have a look around the junkyards. I gathered wires, pieces of cooper, random trinkets, metal scrapes, light bulbs and more. I started at night and worked through the moonlit hours. I pieced everything together quickly and quietly. Attaching trinket to trinket, bulb to bulb. And then, it was finished: my first gallery piece. 

The top of the Empire State Building, created in dark tones of steel and copper, lit up by tiny lights, sprinkle of glitter. All I needed to do was to create something I saw, and what I saw was not natural, flowery, or simple, but it was beautiful.

Art, evolving from uniqueness and speculation. People, evolving from journey and challenge. 

It was all beautiful.