How Do You Solve A Problem Like Maria?

Play to listen this postJamey Hudnall

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If playing possum with my art were a sport, I’d have the Heisman, a Masters green jacket, or the coveted Golden Gloves. 

Minimizing my talent is a skill I possess in spades, the irony being I have two art degrees, a bachelor’s and a master’s. Yet, I still feel like a fraud saying, “I’m an artist.” It feels like cosplay or a hobby I’ve wasted too much money on, but here I am, forty-something, still painting, still producing art-based merch, masquerading as a professional artist, simultaneously working odd jobs to keep the bills paid. 

It’s said that some folks know their passion from an early age. I had a natural proclivity for drawing, painting, and creating, but I can’t say it was ever my passion. My single most desire throughout my youth had nothing to do with my skill set or potential career as a creative. All I longed for was romance, a fantastical, Disney-esque love story, singing flora, fauna, and all.

And as a kid I loved girly things; girl toys, girl books, tv shows and movies, dress up, all the things boys are prohibited from and coached out of doing, a conditioning I submitted to. But when the adolescent hormones kicked in I realized, “Oh shit. This feels different.” 

Turns out the love I had for childhood girlfriends was based more in camaraderie and mutual appreciation. My affection was genuine, but puberty affirmed those gals were actually just bosom buddies. It was the shirtless roofers next door, my tight t-shirted gym coach, and tall men in suits at church that made me swoon, and the one thing I wanted more than anything was for one of them to sweep me up in their burly arms, throw me into the tufted seat of a pumpkin-shaped carriage, and fly me away to same-sex paradise. Phooey on everything else! I needed love, damn it! Someone to share this deep, dark secret with.

Fast forward to age eighteen. What to do with Jamey Hudnall? Well, he’s naturally talented in drawing and painting, loves it because it’s something he’s good at, enjoys, and sets him apart from his peers. And what hasn’t he explored creatively? He’s attended art camps, won contests, sketched, drawn, thrown clay, sculpted, photographed, and thrived in Saturday morning painting classes. Thus, it was decided that the most logical place for a boy like that is art school. 

Four years later I had a BFA in painting. What next? Send him to Italy to see the Renaissance masters and paint. Check! Why stop there? Apply to graduate school and become a Professor of Art like the educators he so admired. Voila! Now he’s off to a Masters program. 

All of this felt like what I should be doing with my life. Besides, I wasn’t interested in much else, certainly not the most focused or studious in the room. Professors and schoolmates could attest that I was never fully present despite steadily progressing downfield. Obviously, a career of some sort would be necessary, and really, what better place for a homo than the Arts? Everyone’s gotta make a living doing something, and it seemed like a vocation I could live with. But that future is not what motivated me. It was merely a means to an end, a have-to on a to-do list that carried me through 13th-19th grades. 

And it’s not that I didn’t care about my art, I just felt I had bigger fish to fry. After all, I’d spent most of my life in hiding, damn it! (Think “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” and “The Defense of Marriage Act”.) And all I really wanted from life was to equalize, to be next to a fella that would love me as much as I wanted to be loved, to hell with everything else. If my studies helped bide my time while searching for an MVP, it was my business and my debt. I’d get the degrees. I just figured I’d take it more seriously later.

The reality was that actual joy and excitement came from time spent with analogous gents I knew carnally across the years, handsome art students, friends of friends, an Italian bodyboarder. Add to it that these guys were like me, second class citizens with whom I did not need to explain my experience or stifle my feelings. We were all participants in the same rigged game.

But, eventually, my path did cross with someone who wanted the same thing as me — a relationship. And for a tumultuous on-again/off-again year and a half, my little heart had what it had spent the entirety of my youth searching for — a likeminded teammate.

Imagine a cold, lazy, wintry Sunday with no place to be and no immediate to-dos wrapped up in the arms of the one you love, watching a rare Southern snow storm roar through. It was everything I’d ever longed for, and finally, after years of bunts and fouls ol’ Jamey Hudnall’s cup runneth over.

And yet, as quickly as it arrived it thawed, and I found myself on the other side of love, disillusioned. With that box checked, I was aimless. The focus of years’ worth of efforts had finally been achieved which left me with no clue as to what could replace that lone desire. But I wouldn’t have to wait long to find out. 

Right at the finish line of my master’s studies my mother fell ill and was gone in a matter of months. Suddenly, in the absence of the woman who had always championed my creativity, my art felt important and worthwhile for the first time, so I shuffled my priorities to become the best art student I could for the last remaining months of my years-long, multitiered education. 

Drowning in grief, it was my art that saved me as I began cobbling together a thesis exhibition that would pay tribute to the person who had encouraged me, endlessly, hoping I’d truly embrace and harness the power of my creativity someday. And cosmically, it was a home run.

Degree in hand, I found myself in my parents’ Mississippi hometown, squatting in a Victorian cottage they had purchased and renovated for their retirement, now left empty. As I worked to move forward, I employed my new credentials to teach Art Appreciation and Design classes online, diapered my cousin’s newborn as a “manny” three days a week, did yard work for generous aunts, became a traveling margarita mix and pickle salesman on the southeastern wholesale trade show circuit for a local business, doing anything and everything to make that monthly student loan payment on top of all my other bills and expenses. And though my art had proven its ability to get me through tough times, again, I eschewed its power. Paint? Make art? What for?! I needed to make money, honey, not flit around with the short-sighted efforts of a previous life, one now buried alongside a Jamey Hudnall that no longer existed.

And despite a few half-hearted attempts to step back up to the plate, I lived in this mindset for years until I reached a point where I could neither see nor desire a life for myself in Mississippi anymore and began searching for a fresh start elsewhere. 

The surprising twist in that search is that it led me right back to where I had left off — that Victorian cottage in the heart of downtown Natchez. In the artless years of my tenure there, the love of a handful of benevolent aunts and cousins had been tacitly rebuilding me, steadily putting me back together. But by the time a whole version of myself was walking the earth again, sorrowfully, I had buried or said goodbye to most of them, too. 

Those kindreds, an extension of my mother’s love, were my team and the sole reason I survived motherless post graduate school. They carried the ball for me until I was in a position to run it again myself. And looking for a way to honor them, it occurred to me that no one would ever know what these people had done for me, how their behind-the-scenes love and efforts rescued me, unless I found a way to communicate it. 

So I launched a Hail Mary and began painting again. And when my paintings did not say all I wanted, I began writing about them as well, over and over again, trying to elucidate the effect their love had upon a life derailed. 

And this is where I find myself now, finally utilizing a skill set that has been an under appreciated space filler despite years’ worth of time and money investing otherwise. 

Misguidedly, I’ve thumbed my nose at my talent most of my existence, at times blaming it for being the reason I wasn’t living a “normal” life like the friends and family in my orbit, nine-to-five-ing their way to retirement.

But as my mother would remind me, “God’s gift to us is our talent, and what we do with that talent is our gift to God.” 

I may never see Super Bowl-sized success in painting or writing, but what cannot be undone is what I am leaving behind now — evidence of someone who ultimately, wholeheartedly, embraced their innate ability, building a career not by playing possum but by courageously taking the field instead.

So fear not, possums! On the other side of indifference and self-doubt is faith and conviction, but you’ll know neither if you throw in the towel. So hit that shit outta the park.

And as for love and romance, I’ve warmed to the idea of recruiting again, so interested benchwarmers, suit up. Tryouts are TBA.