I was eleven when I drew my brown shoe. Brown shoe on a brown table in my grammar-school classroom. Focused on rendering the stitching around an eyelet with a drawing technique I had only recently learned to call cross-hatching. In my memory, with pencil to paper, looking up and down and up again, I suddenly fell, like Alice through the looking-glass, into the space between me and shoe. Or that’s what it felt like, as if the distance between me and the shoe had closed, and that with my pencil I was drawing it into being, one mark at a time. I understood that drawing was a form of magic.

It would happen again when I was sixteen, at work for a month on a drawing of my great-grandmother, then one hundred years old. I understood something I would find the words for only years later, long after her death—that, as John Berger put it, “We who draw do so not only to make something observed visible to others but also to accompany something invisible to its incalculable destination.”

In this way my true vocation revealed itself, though it would have little to do with the long and mostly dreary work history in which, over forty years’ time, I have: scrubbed toilets and worked the grill in a fast-food restaurant; sliced bread, boxed cannoli, and bagged groceries at Catalano’s bakery; waitressed on Lee Road in Cleveland; drew portraits of patrons at an old-time amusement park, as well as assorted car parts in the back room of a sign shop; managed a newsstand and its lonely, late-night customers shopping for foreign cigarettes and pornography; edited newspaper copy on the night shift and book manuscripts at my kitchen table for a university press; shopped and cooked for a woman in a Chicago high-rise; hand-lettered wedding invitations in Copperplate calligraphy; walked the beige corridors for a dozen years in corporate publishing; illustrated magazines on the drafting table in my living room.

Around the edges of those jobs—on weekends, late at night, and then, after my son was born, in the early morning dark—I fell in love, first with watercolor, then with the rigor of Old-Master oil techniques. Through trial and error, and ceaseless experimentation, I took apart the things of the world and put them back together, searching in this way until I could “see” them. All the while I was gradually selling my work, first to friends and family, then to strangers, then to collectors in the United States, then to those abroad, then to the Fisher Museum of Art at the University of Southern California. Among my recent awards are a best-of-show in the 2010 Yosemite Renaissance XXV national juried exhibition; 2008 and 2010 Vermont Studio Center fellowships; and a 2008 John Anson Kittredge Grant. I’ve published illustrations in national and local periodicals, and completed a series of drawings commissioned by the Field Museum in Chicago. My commissioned portraits, landscapes, and works on paper are held in various private collections.

My essay about the influence of poetry on my visual work, “A Primitive Mind,” appeared in the January 2011 issue of “Poetry.” My essay on painting and memory, “Immaterial Witness: An artist excavates the ground of memory and imagination,” was published in the summer/autumn 2010 issue of the “Harvard Divinity Bulletin.”

More information about my work—in oil and on paper—may be found on my website, madeleineavirov.com.

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The photograph above is of my community garden in Eagle Rock, a neighborhood in northeast Los Angeles, in the foothills of the San Gabriel Mountains—or, for the gardeners among you, hardiness zone 10b. The watercolors in the shop were (mostly) painted there. These small close-ups close the distance in time between me and the eleven-year-old and her brown shoe. In their execution, I fall through the looking-glass again, into a green architecture made up of nooks and crannies and shaded, moist spots and fertile pockets where all kinds of living things abide. In the upright networks of tomato vines or closer to the ground, beneath the broad tenting leaves of the squash, I see plants making smaller and smaller copies of themselves as they try to fill space and gather light. The figures of insects, the patterns of leaf, stem, and fruit, echo each other.

Each painting takes roughly two days and fifty-eight years. (I was born in 1955.)

With that, I’ll thank you for visiting and leave you with a story about Picasso:

One day he was drawing in a park when a woman approached him and insisted that he draw her. The artist agreed. After studying her for a moment, he made one mark on the paper, tore it from his sketchbook, and handed it to her. “It’s perfect!” she cried. “You captured my essence with one stroke, in one moment. Thank you! How much do I owe you?” Picasso said five thousand francs. “But how could you want so much money for this picture?” the woman protested. “It took you only a moment to draw it!” To which Picasso replied, “No, Madame, it took me all my life.”