The June Paintings

by Maggie Shipstead

You can’t change where you’re from.” “That’s actually exactly what I’m trying to do.”

I’d started to worry I might not have anything to say with my art, but I assumed the solution was living more life.

Growing up, I had always found myself perched uncertainly between anonymity and consequence: not quite a nobody, not quite somebody.

So maybe there was some relief in being forbidden to flounder and flail for a few months.

I knew the feeling of having nowhere to start, of failing before you’d begun.

I didn’t think whether a person was interesting depended on effort. In fact, I’d always had a sense that trying to be interesting was one of the least interesting things a person could do. I supposed I’d been trying in a way—by moving to New York, by coming to the island—but I’d never pretended to be someone else. I was just putting myself in the way of experience.

I began living in defiance of my own disquiet, pushing away and tamping down any ambivalence, and that aura of rebellion made me the kind of girl people noticed and wondered about, even if I never became a real artist.