Faces of Evil. Lois Gibson
touch of wetness, not just of the paints, but of the wash for the illustration board—too wet and all your colors run together; too dry and the watercolors don’t work. And you have to do all this with squirming subjects or kids who just can’t sit still but who are so cute you want to hug them, with dozens of people standing around, staring at your work over your shoulder.
Most artists aren’t daredevil enough for such torture, but I loved it. The more portraits I did, the more I could feel myself getting faster, smoother, better. I painted tourist portraits all summer long and it was superb introductory training for my life’s work.
However, after one semester at UTA I realized that I needed to find a school that had a more extensive art program. Though I had little money I was determined to get the best education I could for my future art career, whatever that would be. Looking at other nearby schools I liked the one at the University of Texas at Austin, Texas’s capital, and transferred there. Austin is a beautiful capital city filled with cold spring-fed creeks, walking and biking paths, trees and rock formations and more bookstores, per capita, than any other city in the country. It’s a music center famous for launching talent and Sixth Street near the university is crammed chock-a-block with music clubs and quirky shops.
However, I didn’t get many opportunities to enjoy very much song and dance during the three years I lived there while finishing my degree. My life was a blur of day-long art classes and laboratories, followed by waiting tables well into the night, falling into bed for a few brief hours of sleep, then getting up and riding my bike to the shuttle bus to start classes all over again. Somehow I managed to survive on less than $5,000 a year, furnishing my place from garage sales, buying marked-down, on-sale clothes and subsisting on beans, soy, cheese, water and whatever else was cheap.
In my last semester of art school, just before getting my degree, I learned a painful lesson on how to watch for those “signposts” from God.
Call it a “still, small voice” or a gentle nudging, or whatever, but I believe that God sends us guidance in clear ways if we pay attention. I was dating a guy whom I thought I loved. He lived in San Antonio. On weekends I went there to see him. On the way home one Sunday night, I was planning to drop in on a girlfriend for a chat before returning to my place. Suddenly I got this powerful urge to keep on going straight home.
But I didn’t want to go straight home.
The urge grew stronger, more persistent. It was so strong that I actually argued with myself out loud, saying, “No, I’m not going straight home! I want to visit Donna and I’m going to.”
So I did.
Later that night, when I drove down the street leading to my house, I saw a fire truck in my driveway and smoke pouring from my living room!
Later I found out a careless roommate had thrown a rug my sister had hand-made for me over a heating grate and gone out. The rug had caught on fire and burned up my easy chair and hassock (which I sank into every night after exhausting hours waiting tables) and a painting I had just finished as a final major project for my last art class.
My kitty Blackie’s paws were also scorched.
The only reason the whole house didn’t burn down was that the fire station was right across the street and firefighters lounging on their front lawn had quickly spotted the flames.
I had loved that painting, a surreal, romantic work that depicted a lush jungle landscape suspended in mid-air in a blue sky with a waterfall cascading down into a cloud. Now it was almost unrecognizable.
I also loved my cat, whom I spent the night nursing. Heartsick, the next day I dragged my charred canvas to class for my final grade.
Though I explained to my oh-so-sympathetic classmates what had happened, they critiqued the painting anyway, saying things like, “The black velvety structure is so intense!” And, “The blackening actually becomes part of the art...”
I got a “B” on my burnt-up painting.
It was a good lesson, though. I learned never to ignore my inner promptings again. And I never have.
After graduation I moved to San Antonio to be closer to my boyfriend, who was a dental student. San Antonio is a city rich in cultural and historical significance to Texans. It boasts the start of the Texas Revolution, in which a small band of “Texians” held out for thirteen days in the tiny Mission San Antonio de Valero—known throughout the world as “The Alamo”—against overwhelming Mexican forces led by General Antonio Lopez de Santa Anna. The famous defeat inspired other Texians to “Remember the Alamo” and eventually win their independence from Mexico.
The influence of the Mexican culture can still be seen all over the city and through the years, San Antonio has become a mecca for tourists, offering such attractions as Sea World, Fiesta Texas, historical restored theatres, cultural centers and the River Walk.
Strange as it may seem, I actually enrolled at the University of Texas Health Science Center at the San Antonio Dental School.
I wasn’t studying to be a dentist, but rather a maxillo-facial prosthesis technician who makes artificial eyes, noses, ears and other facial parts for patients who’ve lost them due to trauma or surgery. (I didn’t realize it then, but that training would later enable me to draw even the most complicated jaw and teeth structures when doing forensic sketches. If someone tries to describe, say, an unusual overbite, I understand immediately what they are talking about and can draw it with little trouble.)
The first time I saw San Antonio’s beautiful River Walk, my emotional reaction to it was so powerful, so visceral, that my eyes filled with tears and I became almost physically ill.
The San Antonio River ribbons gently in and out of the downtown area and throughout the city. Located one flight below the downtown streets, the River Walk is like entering another world. Lined by softly swaying cypress trees, the banks of the river are dotted with sidewalk cafes, hideaway clubs, live music and shops of every kind. River taxis cruise slowly past and the sights, sounds and colors are, to an artist, like walking into a kaleidoscope.
But it wasn’t the beauty of the place that overwhelmed me. It was one of those nudges from God again, only this time, it was more like a sledgehammer to the side of the head.
I’ve got to do portraits here! I thought and the impulse was so strong that, for a moment, I wondered if I’d said it out loud.
I had to. That’s all. Period.
Girls growing up in the fifties were taught to be pleasers, “nice girls,” to hide our intelligence from men so that they could always feel smarter, to be ladies, to have, as the Bible says, “a sweet and gentle spirit.”
That’s pretty strong conditioning to overcome and I sometimes wonder what drove me to be so stubbornly independent. Somehow I mustered the courage to approach various businesses located on the River Walk and requested permission to set up my easel and two chairs and sketch tourists for money. I always offered the manager a percentage of my income. But even though I worked at four separate businesses, not a single one took any money from me.
For I always attracted business for them and me.
The first couple of years, I worked mostly weekends, but it became clear to me that I was making so much money that I didn’t need to do anything else. In fact, I didn’t want to. Eventually, I dropped out of dental school and spent most of my time along the River Walk doing portraits and I loved every minute of it.
In all, I did more than three thousand portraits in that milieu.
But then something stopped me in my tracks and sent me to Houston, something more than the doomed romance that was petering out, something more than my restless heart’s desire for a fresh start.
My body.
Nowadays, “repetitive motion injuries” such as carpal tunnel syndrome are widely understood, but at that time, I never gave a thought to the thousands and thousands of times I turned my head back and forth like someone watching a ping pong match—subject to canvas, canvas to subject. I