Perhaps a chameleon, perhaps a fraud, either way, I’m on the outside looking in.  The way I felt when my mother slammed the back door tightly shut and told me to stay out.  There was a definitive inside and a definitive outside in my childhood, the back door being the line of demarcation between the two realities.  Outside was all knowing, a sense of self and a sense of place. Empty and alone, and yet somehow free and hopeful, a playground of the creative spirit in me. Free from the tyranny of life in an alcoholic household.  Inside was not any of those things. Inside was fearful and stifling.  There was a small place in that mad house that I claimed as mine, my dominion, my kingdom.  It was a corner of the big, green kitchen in that dark house, Kim’s corner.  There was a children’s roll top desk, modeled after the adult version, and certainly too grown up looking to be a child’s play toy.  But play toy it was, for Kim’s corner was a respite in the midst of the storm, a place of creative imagination that would take me far away from my existence.  That’s why I say chameleon perhaps, or fraud, for I am a wannabe artist, locked out of the studio.

Wannabe writer, wannabe anything, something.  Jack-of-all-trades, master of nothing.  I fit the bill of tortured artist.  I possess the obligatory mental and emotional baggage necessary for good art. I’m not good at finance and business, but I have good ideas, good photographs, good stories, and good functional pots thrown on the potter’s wheel.  I read all the magazines, Provincetown Arts, Ceramics Monthly, and Outdoor Photographer.  I have spent countless hours pouring over books in the library, learning my craft(s). I have submitted short stories to literary reviews.  I’ve had shows with my photography, and studied Food Styling for print ad and commercial photography at New York University.  I’ve designed and produced handmade art cards, having studied at Parsons School of Design in Manhattan. My photography company was called KLG Photo Designs. My distinct culinary ability led to a fairly successful catering business in Boca Raton. I’ve taken ceramic arts workshops at art schools such as the John C. Campbell Folk Art School in the mountains of North Carolina.  I’ve been commissioned by the owner of a Ceramics Studio in Naples to produce teapots with lids for her to give as Holiday gifts.  I’ve made my own Japanese inspired paintbrushes from bamboo and feathers and been asked to display them in a gallery and sell them on the gallery website.  The name of my pottery “studio” is KG Pottery.  I’m almost completely self-taught.

An obsessive compulsive personality is of great benefit for someone like myself who dives into various projects or interests like a dog with a bone, like a shark to the scent of blood, like white on rice.  Recently I have become aware of the Enneagram, which describes the nine basic personality types and involves the strategy we use to avoid pain and have our needs met. I submitted to the testing and my personality, “the Individualist”, exemplifies the following: “Compulsion to be extraordinary, special, unique; sensitive to art and beauty; paradoxically feels both shameful/fatally flawed, and unique/elite”.  Well that explains it! That’s me. And yet I feel like the great pretender, a wannabe who isn’t.  Like little Oliver in the Dickens story, holding his bowl and looking longingly into his keepers eyes with the words, “please sir, I want some more”.  I want some of the artist’s life.  I want to toil endlessly for meager wages.  I want to be at the mercy of the buying public who doesn’t a good pot if it fell into their lap.  I want to face repeated rejection and rebuke for my writing. Just kidding, I don’t have a thick skin.  Unfortunately, I guess deep inside I long for approval.  It’s a constant balancing act, my psyche’.  Only in my writing can I cry out, “here I am, I count, I am worthy”. Only in my art can I say that which I don’t have the courage to believe.  Potential, untapped.  Dying to come out.  I’m unafraid in my writing, and my art.  It’s here that I can say things.  It’s here, on the page, that I dare to dream.  It’s here on the page and in my art that I am full of unrealized greatness.  Or maybe I’m just a pretender, on the outside, looking in.