Excerpt from "How to Draw the Sky"
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Place a white egg on a white surface with one light pointed at it from the side.
Working in pencil, draw the egg without lines.
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Footsteps make different sounds in old houses.
Rooms with tall ceilings hold more sound. They hold more dreams and fears, too.
When I was little, those ceilings looked impossibly far away. I couldn’t wait to get big enough to touch them.
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Any gradient from white to black is called value. This applies to color as well as grayscale. Drawing a white egg is the perfect opportunity to practice creating a range of values using only shading to define the form.
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It’s a dark, warm wall with a nighttime white ceiling the color of closed eyes. I see this while I wait for my mother to “come tell me goodnight.” This was a nightly ritual, my mother sitting on each of her three sons’ beds and scratching our backs, making funny noises by squeezing the palm of our hands, listening to us talk about our day or dreams or fears, and telling us she loved us.
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Simply put, the egg will have a highlight side and a shadow side. The white table, too, will have a brighter side along with the shadow cast by the egg.
The fun part is noticing how much light there is in the shadows. Reflected light from the table bounces up into the shadow on the egg and informs its rounded shape. Look for this.
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f you open your eyes underwater in the Tennessee River, it will be so murky that the only way to tell which way is up is to look for the glow of the sky. The muddy bottom will be dark. Everything will be bathed in green and copper.
My dad dropped me from a dock into a floating black rubber innertube. I hadn’t anticipated what would happen. I hadn’t been told what to do, so I didn’t hold my arms out. I dropped straight through it like a pencil.
I stayed under. I was so confused by the world in which I found myself. Where was this? How did I get here? Everything was different. I didn’t belong there, but it never dawned on me to try and leave.
It was kind of wonderful.
So I looked at the colors and the light of the sky above. I could no longer hear the people on the dock. I was away.
My dad jumped in and pulled me up.
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My oldest brother was born when my parents were twenty-six. They had another boy two years later. They weren’t planning on having a third child. After I was born, my father got a vasectomy.
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After the egg, set up a still-life of fabric. Drape a solid colored cloth or shirt over a box or a vase. Let the fabric create natural folds and pooling on the table.
As before, don’t use any lines when you draw. Only shading, values of gray.
Study the shadows and the reflected light in the shadows. Notice the layers of hills and valleys in the folds.
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I sleep with my good ear down, my deaf ear up.
When your head is against the pillow, even when your head is very small, the only thing you can hear is your heartbeat. It’s probably your jugular vein carrying blood through your neck, hitting the pillowcase each time it passes.
The muffled quality makes it sound like it’s coming from far away.
I heard it and wondered who was leaving down the back stairs.
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After learning to swim, I loved going to the pool. I’d spend entire days swimming underwater. I liked seeing if I could hold my breath and swim the length of the pool or how long I could stay on the sloped floor leading to the deep end. I also played a game where I would pull myself down to the bottom rung of the metal ladder and blow bubbles. The steps of the ladder were like upside down trays, and the air would get stuck in them. I went under as many times as it took to fill the underside of each step with air.
With my goggles on, I could go back under and look up at the mercury-like air shimmering as if slices of sky. I loved it down there. I could be left alone. No one knew I was able to harness the sky and bring it down with me.