Art Has Served Me Well

Art Has Served Me Well

By Kathleen Gamble

There are a lot of successful, even famous TCKs in the arts. Many of them probably never knew they were TCKs or what it means to be a TCK. But they are good actors, musicians, artists. We are good at moving into other worlds, pretending we are other people, reinventing ourselves, creating new personas, and surrounding ourselves with imaginary scenarios. We incorporate all the different stories and fables we have heard from around the world. We hunt with the Masai in East Africa, we ride camels across the desert with the Bedouins, we drink in beer halls with the Germans, we dance Giselle at the Bolshoi in Moscow, we are glass blowers in Venice, and we wander through museum after museum. Our imaginations are constantly being poked.

I went off to boarding school when I was thirteen and ended up in a painting class in order to get out of study hall. I had always been a ballet dancer as well as interested in acting. I had never thought about being a painter. I was exposed to a new world and I loved it. Our teacher taught us to build our own canvases, and we could work in oils or acrylic. I chose acrylic because I wanted things to happen more quickly. I wanted bright colors. My thing was landscapes and abstracts. I loved the mountains and sunsets. I liked big canvases with lots of color.

My first painting at age thirteen:

It now hangs over my niece’s bed. If you look closely you can see the marks where it has been rolled up and re-stretched several times for shipping. I continued to paint for several years, but I soon realized it was difficult to travel with large canvases. As long as I was living with my parents, I could ship things around the world, but once I was on my own it was no longer practical. Living in small apartments was also a problem. I quit painting.

About five years later, I was living in Arlington, Virginia, going a bit nuts, out of sorts, and I needed an outlet. Where was my creative outlet? So I enrolled in a colored pencil class at the Torpedo Factory in Alexandria. It re-ignited my love of making art and it was portable! All I needed was some paper and my bag of pencils.

Years later I picked up needlepoint. It reminded me of the tapestries of old. I found I could design my own, and although it was very time consuming, I found it satisfying and again, portable.

My teacher at the Torpedo Factory said working on a drawing was one of the best vacations possible. You got so deep into your right brain, you lost all track of the rest of the world. I couldn’t afford to travel at the time, but I could have my brain vacation and I still do. It especially came in handy during the pandemic.

Art has served me well.

Colored pencil on paper with stars inked with markers, 2021.

Kathleen Gamble has lived in Burma, Mexico, Colombia, Nigeria, Switzerland, Netherlands, Russia, and around the USA. She is the author of Expat Alien, a memoir about growing up on five continents. She has a vast postcard collection and blogs at PostcardBuzz. com. She draws and does needlepoint in St Paul, Minnesota.