Erase, erase, erase.

I found myself out through conversations this weekend. Now, I've always been bad at inciting social banter, and I can't carry a conversation for the life of me -- err. Wait. No. Let me rephrase that.

(Erase, erase.)

I can catch, stretch and carry a conversation easy, but I've always failed at the art of picking one up when it falls. Because of this, I've been starting to pay more attention to the things I say, paying more attention to the responses, and generally slowing down so that I may know where to start. I learned a lot about myself this way, if purely by accident.

At a drawing party this Friday (Yes! There was free wine, five nude porn stars to model and interesting rock mashups that fit the mood perfectly) I was leaning back on the floor seats, beautifully at peace with the large newsprint sagging around my lap. I occupied one side of the open pad, while my girl BJ sketched on the other. She was using markers, making delicate outlines, ultimately deciding placements and proportions, while I screamed my bright colored pastels all over the surface of my pages, throwing in defining trails of dark and highlighting blocks of white. Whenever I made mistakes in proportion -- inevitable in almost every session (the minute my eyes zeroed in on details, the entire image would expand in my head) -- I simply ran my palms over them to blur the chalky errors. At the same time, my left hand would be selecting a different color to begin that failed section over, eyes squinting harder now, darting around the negative to relate better in comparison.

At one point during the four hour drawathon, I glanced down at my stained fingers, giggling at the muted piles of pastel dust that had settled around my crossed knees. I dug into her bag of Prismacolor markers and started sketching a different pose. I was thoroughly frustrated after five minutes.

She was observing my quick, flat strokes, my attempts at shading in the back and shoulder blades, my struggle with dimensions and perspective. After two figures, both too large to fit the page, I ripped out the sheet and shook my head. "I can't do this marker thing." She looked over. I picked up a blunted pastel stick and began to slash lines and curves mirroring the models, using the long flat side to indicate reality, shade.

"You have to do the outline first when you're using the marker, it's different," she said. She explained that when she took her first life drawing class, she was taught how to gaze at the models and within the first 30 seconds, asses the whole image before placing lines onto paper. I never learned that, I only knew how to dive in with my eyes, to absorb and to immediately reflect with my fingers.

"I can't," I said. "I need the shadows to tell me where the outlines go."

"Really?" She blinked. "I use the outlines to figure out where the shadows go."

Hm.

All throughout high school, our styles were vastly different -- her drawings were extremely clean cut, not a single detail out of place, complex but excruciatingly simple. All my drawings were scribbled in, highlighted, instant -- the mistakes were glaringly obvious, for they all left imprints behind. The outlines, cemented towards the end, would be carved in and definite. Yet the finished product bore those mistakes proudly, somehow managing to integrate them into the outcome.

"Can't use markers," I repeated. My hands followed my eyes. "Was never able to. They don't leave room for error." Twitch. My ears caught.

She's been using pen and ink on her art for a long time now, and though it would have been easy to shrug off her immense talent as the result of years of practice, I knew it was something bigger than that. The way BJ and I drew reflected our own personalities. The way we expressed art was the way we lived our lives. She rarely made a superfluous move, everything was planned out and assessed; when she did something wrong she would never make that same mistake again. I, on the other hand, flung myself into phases, made a mess out of things by living through experience. I could only grow by learning, burning and shedding skins. I always, always left a mess behind, wherever I went. I look upon my past as a series of permanent, beautiful mistakes, and I see my future the same way.

Just made me wonder -- and the metaphors still stand -- was I supposed to be sharpening my artistic style, slowly fading the errors out over time, learning to avoid them in the future so that my drawings could come out cleaner?

Or, should I just embrace this fully as my style, and continue to let these mistakes form art?

I remember saying once, in defense to my peers' frustration to the way I was living my life: "This is how I've always been. And this is what I'll continue to do, until I know better -- or everything, whichever comes first." I'm not sure my art will continue to be my art if I learned how to carefully avoid stray lines. They are all a part of my expression.

I looked down at the newsprint, now exploding with greens and reds and lips and eyes, and I grinned. This was the best work I've created in a long, long time. Mistakes or not, I was absolutely thrilled at the completed pieces. Two of the porn stars ran over to me, still naked, smiles big. "I saw you drawing me out of the corner of my eye, can I see it??"

"Sure!" I lit back, and unrolled the large, loud sheets. I'd taken a break from the body to make huge, larger than life close-ups of these girls' faces. On impulse, I gave the drawings away to the models that inspired them. Nicole, the cute (my favorite) olive skinned girl with cartoonish eyes and a cheek piercing, large black ringlets falling over her breasts. She had the curly defined mouth of a doll, thin drawn-on eyebrows, and the most adorable lips that tucked in at the corners. Jessie, the sharp scarlet redhead, with pale cream skin and industrial eyeliner. Her perfectly regal lips were stained darker in the corners, her nose seemed carved out of limestone, her eyes were a thin gray-green. She had tattoos stapled to her heart.

I didn't regret giving the drawings away until much later, when I was sitting in a bar nearby, flipping through the artwork to show a friend we had run into there. Unfortunately, I'd given away my best pieces. The rest, what I was left with, were practice, scribbles, worthless. Seeing his disinterested eyes, hearing his flat-toned compliments, looking down and grimacing at the rough-edged vaginas I fanned out before him, I realized that this is how most people really remember me: for my sketches, for my errors -- rarely for my triumphs.

Can I blame them, when I have no proof?

Perhaps none of that is important. After all, the ones who really matter are the ones there for the process -- to observe the creation, to see the outcome, and to receive the best I can possibly give.

Thank you for that.