Eighth Grade, Again
Yesterday was the last day of summer that still felt like summer — no back-to-school list attached to it yet. We did the required things: ice cream before lunch, the pool until our fingers pruned, one more trip to the beach that we both pretended wasn't the last one. My daughter starts eighth grade next week, and somewhere underneath all of it was the shopping list still sitting on the kitchen counter: the specific binder, the right folder color, the sneakers that are apparently a whole personality now.
I remember what that year does to you. Not the classes — the wanting. You want to belong to something, and you also want to be unmistakably yourself, and nobody warns you those two things are going to fight each other for the next several years. Watching her stand in the shoe aisle weighing which version of herself she's going to be in September, I kept thinking: I know this. Not from being twelve again, but from doing this for a living.
There's a version of eighth grade that never really leaves you if you make things for other people to look at. You want a shelf somewhere — a gallery, a genre, a following that already exists so you can just step into it. And you also want the harder, lonelier thing, which is to make something nobody else already made. I felt it in the festival tents in Southwest Florida, every booth trying to look like it belonged next to the one beside it and also like nothing else there. I felt it teaching, watching a thousand students try to find their own hand while mine was the only map they had. I feel it now, in the smaller room I'm painting out of, wanting the work to read as mine and also wanting it to be nothing I've made before.
Quite honestly, most days I don't know which one wins. Some mornings I want the sketchbook to look like it belongs in the same stack as last year's. Some mornings I want to close that stack and start a page that owes nothing to any of it.
What I do know is that I love this time of year too much to spend it only dreading the shopping list.
There's something about a blank three-ring binder I never got over. The whole unmarked future of it, before a single tab's been labeled. Every September some part of me wants to be handed Algebra I and told to just start, badly, on purpose. Right now that's the oasis pages in the sketchbook. I'm not ready to say much about them yet — only that they're the ones I keep going back to, the way you go back to the one class that's actually hard, not because you're good at it but because you're not, yet.
Years ago I painted a piece called Far From Pier Pressure — boats out on the water, far enough past the dock that nobody's watching who's doing what. I named it as a joke at the time. It's turned into something closer to a working theory: the good version of anything usually happens a little ways off from where everyone's standing, not performed for them. It's in the shop now, paper and canvas both — come take a look, and let me know where it ends up if you bring one home.
If you follow along on Instagram, you've probably already seen a corner of the oasis pages, mid-thought, before I know what they're going to be. And if you want the part that sits even earlier than that — the pages before they're anything — Studies from the Studio is still the closest way to see it.
School starts Friday. So does whatever this next stretch of sketchbook turns into. I'm trying to let both start a little unsure, on purpose.
— Shelby
