The Only Thing You Need To Learn About Art-Making

Or: finding ease isn’t easy

I’m writing this essay on the train on the way to my second-ever college-level comics class as a professor. When I walked into the classroom last week, I felt like a miscreant in a palace, running fingertips over the wall-to-wall tackboard like a person who had never touched tacks and thought they might be breakable. I put on music, but as soon as someone walked past the door, I turned it off again. Surely I didn’t have the jurisdiction to choose music for all of the air of this sacred arena.

In college, I did a Study Domestic program in Chicago (like Study Abroad, except…), and quickly fell in love with the things most people fall in love with: a lake with sandy beaches!; architecture brimming with gargoyles and decorative molding!; the train on the elevated tracks that went everywhere quickly! But the head-over-heels sensation didn’t come until I stepped into The Art Institute of Chicago — and in particular when I saw Edward Hopper’s Nighthawks in person, just hanging there on a wall, like it wasn’t Nighthawks.

In real life it doesn’t glow, but it feels like it does. This an all illustrations (unless otherwise noted) are drawn by the author, who is me, Sophie Lucido Johnson.

If the Portland Art Museum had been my high school boyfriend (comfortable, safe, but probably moving back after college to live too close to his parents), and The Metropolitan Museum had been a too-old-for-me sophisticated fling (gorgeous…