Outdoors with James Egan

The classroom at that community college was something out of a film or something that you could imagine an art class would be. Easels and their quiet young adult and middle age students scattered round all facing the center where the instructor was on a short platform rise.

Eventually after some weeks we would have a nude model. And the very strange thing is that I cannot remember many specifics about the nude model, and nothing about the drawing that I made of the nude model, except that I’m sure I wasn’t satisfied. And frustrated thereafter that I didn’t have a photographic memory to keep her more exact in my head.

Only a general impression.

The nude model was in a very difficult and luxurious pose and wrapped in a very light tan linen in a very careful, appropriate manner. And that was about as much real woman’s skin as I had ever seen. I thought it was strange that they allowed a real nude model in a class with teenage boys. I was nineteen myself. Not only because I thought of our community as pretty prudish, but because I thought teenage American boys were such wild childs.

I remember in our drawing class that there was one very good looking young woman – blonde and tall – as a student, much more adult and matured than me, all together like a young woman that had been a prom queen at Stillwater or Hill Murray ten years earlier, and that she was so unsophisticated that her drawings of the nude were only a circle for the head with two points as eyes and an upturned smile and then a stick figure down below. Not quite that bad, but totally off with the angles and curves and distances and lines. Plus, to fill in the time while the rest of us went on with or drawing and erasing and staring, all around the empty places of her paper the tall young blonde woman drew circular heads and smiley faces on the heads and down them stick figure arms with five finger hands.

But what I do remember very clearly, and a little sheepishly, is when we went out of the studio two weeks later in the warm mid-spring evening to our very neat and very well-kempt community college campus, where out back there was a gentle slope to the south behind all the concrete buildings and which led down into a small pond wrapped by the trees, where we took our charcoal and newspaper thin paper on a board and where we sat down on the spring lawn and were instructed to draw what we saw.

And on that evening I drew with charcoal and a tissue and my fingers rubbing and some spittle the mown grass sloping down abrupt to the wild grasses, and the shimmering water above and the evergreens contrasted with the low sun and the fully-leafed deciduous trees and shrubs ranging from black to gray to white.

And I knew, when we went back into the studio from the green spring evening, and we hung our drawings in charcoal on newspaper on our student easels that I had been always and could be still always an artist because the students and the teacher gathered around me and gathered round my picture and asked questions like, ‘How did you do that?’ referring to some effect I’d created. And, ‘Did you really see that?’ regarding an impression I was making. And, ‘What’s that?’ if an impression might not have worked completely, but intrigued the viewer.

What great questions for a young artist. What great questions for a young writer. What great questions for any artist or writer of any age. Even middle-age.

A third of a century on, I know that if I want to, I could go down the steep hill under the dying paper birches and through the sprouting balsam firs to the deep, cold boreal lake – the lake trout lake – and there among the alders sit on the bank with charcoal, tissue, a rubber eraser and my saliva, and on whatever paper I may have, draw the lake in the woods.

Maybe you can fix carburetors, you can cook crispy fried chicken, you can catch walleye, you can grow asparagus and apple trees. Maybe I cannot do these things. But I can do other things.

Still, all of these doings are fleeting in the longer or shorter run – a single meal of fried chicken, a managed asparagus patch, the apple trees that are generational at their best. They’re all more or less fleeting. I’m feeling a little more final, the last of our little bubbling, toiling and troubled stew of Irish, Swedes and Germans. Except my brother. He may be a little less fleeting by a couple years, but will be no less final.