Painting in Public

I am not a painter, but I can paint a little.

I enjoy the process of painting. It forces me to slow down, and demands attention to detail. Letting myself fall into a process for a couple of hours is calming, and it’s satisfying to have something to show for it at the end.

When I was a freshman in college, my dorm let students decorate our hall by painting murals on the walls. I took ownership of one rectangle of wall between two doors. The theme was “space,” and there was no way I was letting our hall escape without some Star Trek representation.

Over the next couple months, I painted a large USS Enterprise flying through a purple, pink, and blue nebula. It was slow going. I still had classes to attend, homework to do, and friends with whom to incite mischief. But on the occasional weekend, when there was nothing to do and nobody to chat with, I spread newspapers across the floor, bundled a couple tubes of paint together, and got to work.

At first I played audiobooks while I painted. That was too distracting, though, so I eventually switched to music. My hands were full, and sometimes got smeared with paint, so whatever playlist I put on, I couldn’t change it later, aside from the Forward and Back buttons on my speaker.

Regular college life flowed around me, but it was fun to be in the way. When night rolled around, I was passed by groups of students, some drunk, some just on their way to the bathroom. Sometimes they would stop and talk with me. Our conversations were short, and always ended with a “good luck with your painting” or “it’s really coming along.” I didn’t make friends with any of the passerby, but I got a small glimpse into the lives of random college students as they moved in and out of our brick oven of a dorm.

Painting gave me a chance to de-stress from my day-to-day concerns. I did a lot of thinking during the hours when it was just me, the paint, and the wall. Now, I don’t remember what I thought about, but I remember the trance-like state it put me in. Sometimes I would look up, and realize that I was finished with another section or layer, and hadn’t noticed the time passing.

The mural was not crazy impressive -- just the result of a lot of patience. I started with a printed-out picture, then a pencil sketch, then painted along and within the lines of that sketch. I had trouble painting straight lines, and used a lot of post-its to keep the twitches of my hands from ruining hours of work. Someone with more talent could have done in a week what I did over three months. At the end, though, I was proud of what I’d made. I signed it with a handprint making the Vulcan salute, in case the mural itself wasn’t nerdy enough.

The USS Enterprise may still be flying through the halls of Helser, but I haven’t checked on it since that first year of college. Regardless of how long it stays there, I think the person who got the most out of it was myself.