Blank Space

There's a famous self portrait of Edgar Degas, the guy who sculpted and painted ballerinas. He painted himself in searing accuracy, until you get to the bottom left corner. He left it blank. An open, empty space of white canvas (now faded into pearl white).

I think to myself it must have some greater meaning. But maybe that's the meaning of what he did, leaving it blank - he wants you to wonder.

It is art, after all.

When I started writing on this website in April 2020, I had no idea what I was doing. Instead of being a masterful painting with one blank space, I was a blank space with perhaps one small space of mastery. I wrote apology letters to my sister, who had banished me, and wrote about the men who had hurt me. I wrote a piece about the walls talking to me for a challenge, and got some good feedback. Perhaps I had found my niche.

Sometimes I reflect on that period of time. Why did I write?

I needed a self portrait, I think. Something to sustain me. I was in lockdown with two other people, both men who wanted nothing to do with me, and vice versa. At one point I only had champagne and eggs in our fridge, which one of the men commented on in disbelief, and the only way I could combat his words was to write about it.

April 2020 needed some kind of definition, and I was happy to shatter any illusions I might have had about normalcy. The world wasn't normal, but neither was I, and I finally had a way to get it out in a constructive way. (Cooking the eggs and getting drunk on the champagne at 2PM wasn't the constructive way, as it turns out.)

As I typed out responses to each challenge, I became more and more myself, the blank spaces disappearing.

But of course, or perhaps, every artist leaves some illusion, some mystery. I hope I have a blank space, some piece that's missing, that only I can harness - perhaps for my art, perhaps for myself.