Small Perfections

Way down in what passes for my soul, I’ve always felt an impatience—a kind of ungenerous demand for efficiency, immediacy, and speed. Add to that the small tremor I’ve always had in my hands, and I may be the worst painter in the world today.

Weekly Standard Illustration; Bucket, bigstockphoto

Room and house painter, that is. My lack of talent at more artistic painting leaps beyond the petty confines of individual ability to reach historic levels: I’m cosmically bad at putting paint on canvas. Unless, that is, you care for portraits of blobs and messes. Imagine a Jackson Pollock drip composition, except that the colors have all merged to form a monochrome brown tinged with sick green—by an artist who was trying to paint a realistic landscape.

At the more mundane kinds of painting, however, I’m merely bad. When I try to paint a room, there are dribbles on the floor. Corners skipped. Bald patches. Goopy, overpainted sections. Wavy lines. A sloppy performance that doesn’t even fulfill my hunger for quick completion, since the whole thing has to be done over again. By someone else.

I’m just as bad at sanding. And machining. Model-airplane assembly. Reinserting those tiny screws in the earpieces of eyeglasses. Arranging lead soldiers in accurate representation of the Battle of Gettysburg. Brain surgery, too, I assume, although I’ve not yet had occasion to try it.

Basically, I’m rotten at anything that requires precision, care, and patience. Anything fiddly.