Intuiting that my fear in painting class wasn’t just a temporary problem I was going to get over any time soon, and knowing it wasn’t healthy to live with so much anxiety, I set out to learn to paint on my own. I soon discovered, however, that even though I might experience a measure of confidence about a project while I was in the flush of creation, when I finished it—if I finished it—I invariably became so doubtful about its merit, I wound up either convinced it was worthless or so unsure I didn’t dare show it to anyone. Without positive feedback or guidance, I seemed doomed to repudiate everything I created. Looking back on it now, I know that my insecurity was a function of a larger self-doubt. If you’ve been made to feel you don’t have any value, how can you believe that anything that derives from you does? It was many years before I was able to sustain a sense of satisfaction in anything I created, and I still have trouble believing it could be of interest or value to anybody else.

“The next assignment, an abstract, was even more baffling to me than the previous ones because I didn’t have a clue about what a good abstraction was. Some of my classmates liked what I came up with halfway through the assignment, but my teacher thought it was trite. Frustrated, I broke up the picture into formlessness, and when he came around again, he said, ‘Better.’ I took the painting home over the weekend—by now I was working and worrying over my paintings at home as well as in class—and though I stared at it all weekend, I was so utterly at a loss about what more I could do that I never even picked up my brush.

“I carried my abstract back to class just as it was, only now it was heralded by my teacher as a finished piece (?). At the next critique, however, he called it an accident, a fluke—and laughed about it. The painting that he really raved about was done by one of his protégés. This student had poured greenish-brown paint over a canvas and driven his car tire over it, leaving a muddy track. I’d once written, ‘My aspiration has always been to make beautiful things—simple and spare, like a Japanese flower arrangement or a Shaker chair. I think of creative work as an act of spiritual devotion—that what you make you should invest with all your ability, with care and reverence.’ Now I began to feel like some weird throwback who was hopelessly trapped in an outmoded aesthetic.

“For our fifth assignment we were allowed to choose our subject. I hadn’t been able to come up with anything in class, so I set a blank canvas against the wall of my bedroom, waiting for inspiration. When it didn’t come and I found myself on a Sunday night with nothing to show for my Monday class, I cut out a newspaper picture of Cat Stevens, and, in a towering fury at my own impotence, I painted for an hour or more like someone crazed, never pausing or standing back even once to evaluate what I was doing. When my anger was finally spent and I did step back, I was dumbfounded by what I saw, the portrait looked so alive to me. It was then that I had one of the strangest experiences of my life. It seemed to me that until that moment I’d only imagined I knew my own dimensions, but now a trap door had opened beneath my feet and I was falling through depths I hadn’t known existed before. I started to shake uncontrollably while the painted face I was looking at metamorphosed back and forth from Cat Stevens’ bearded face into my own.

“The next few classes I missed because I was sick, but I took my painting to the next critique, even though it wasn’t quite finished—I couldn’t get the hand that was resting on the guitar quite right. Also, as I was well aware, the whole composition was skewed to one side.

“When I arrived, I saw the paintings everybody else had done in my absence stacked against the walls—abstracts created by pouring paint on the canvas, the assignment I’d missed. They were all so bold and vibrant, my own painting seemed to me murky and flawed alongside them, and suddenly I felt a terrible vulnerability about showing this particular picture. In the end we never got to the critique—I don’t remember why—so I never received any feedback on my portrait, and I took it home relieved, knowing I’d never go back to class again.”

About my painting class, I wrote later:

“I remember only dimly the quality of anguish I felt as I drove off to my first class—and every one after that—a stomach-churning anxiety; I had to muster every ounce of determination I had simply to hold myself together. My teacher was dark, wiry, in his thirties, and I might have even found him attractive if the set of his mouth and chin hadn’t reminded me so much of a sleazy guy I’d met recently.

“For our first assignment we were directed to paint a monochromatic still life of a bleach bottle and some other mundane objects. I felt like a blind man who’d been abandoned in a city and left to find his own way around. I didn’t even know how to hold the brush. The teacher sketched out a composition for me, basking in my mute admiration, and showed me how to stand back to do the strokes, Actually, I felt so paralyzed with bewilderment, I let him paint most of the picture for me.

“At the next class I was frantic and angry at my own helplessness and fear—I felt I’d be humiliated if the same thing were to happen again. So I dashed out a picture with a vengeance, as though I were slashing my way out of nets of inhibition that ensnared me. It’s true that he needed to stop me—I might have gone on to ruin my painting—but as it stood, it was a success, although I didn’t know this until the ‘crit’ (critique). I thought it was a failure because it was a circumvention of the reality I couldn’t paint—light and shadow, three-dimensionality. But my classmates and teacher saw it as a unique vision—although flat, more colorful and lyrical than life. ‘Where did you get a technique like that?’ the teacher asked about my brush strokes. ‘Use it to death.’

“Our next assignment we had longer to work on. I was attending class three times a week, toting the canvases I’d learned to build and a cake pan full of acrylics, and wearing a huge doctor’s coat for a smock, trying to look cool and savoir-faire, but I was scared stiff the whole time. I painted a magical glade I’d photographed alongside the road to Cuenca in Spain. Again the teacher had to stop me before I painted out the best part of my picture, suggesting I use the airy technique in the upper corner throughout.

“This picture, also, was a success. At the crit he described it as having ‘delightful’ parts. In the meantime, however, I’d begun to notice his flagrant favoritism towards his two pets—both men. I would hear him, bent head-to-head with them, giving them pep talks about their gift and mission, etc. He set up a competitive spirit in the class that I didn’t like, and eventually we locked horns. He insisted that I come to all the critiques—I’d made up my mind not to because I found them so gut-wrenching. He chewed out people who hadn’t managed to produce a finished painting and expected us to analyze each other’s work, which I felt totally unequipped to do. He got angry at me when I tried to explain that I wanted to learn something about painting for my own edification—I didn’t care about getting the credits—and hoped to go about it the least stressful way possible. In the end I capitulated and attended the critiques, not wanting to antagonize him further.