For the last month or so I have been at the Metropolitan Opera House at Lincoln Center, drawing the performers, staff and crew of American Ballet Theatre as they go about the business of filling an empty stage. I draw in pen and ink, with no rough drafts and no starting over. Each drawing is a live reaction to the moment, a surprise to me as it appears, a trust exercise and attempt to make something ephemeral and fleeting last.  It’s been a while since I last drew A.B.T. — seven years — and I can’t help thinking now of that time, and of the grief, luck and the series of rash decisions that first led me here. Being here again reminds me that every day is a blank page upon which anything can be written. Or drawn, as the case may be.  Nowadays, I’m a freelance artist with a blog where I post drawings of musicians, actors and dancers. I’m also the archival artist for Joe’s Pub at The Public Theater, where I draw performers during their sets and sound checks, and a member of the Indie folk-rock, art-collective Balthrop, Alabama: I sketch as they play, and my work is projected on a screen behind them as it happens, like a live cartoon.  Nine years ago, however, I was a theater professor in Austin, Tex. I had drawn all my life, but had never taken an art class. I was a compulsive doodler who had never viewed drawing as anything other than a diversion until, quite suddenly, I realized that it was actually the rest of my life that had been the diversion.  This realignment of priorities came about during a relentless period of loss. During my last three years of graduate school, I lost my great aunt, my step-father, my grandfather, a dissertation advisor and finally my mother, whose funeral took place between my thesis defense and my graduation.  Overwhelmed by grief, I found myself drawing again, as I had not drawn since before grad school — notions from my head, floating hands and disembodied heads with empty spaces where the bodies were suggested but not drawn. I drew spaceships and birds, circles and flowing hair. The kind of thing one finds in the margins of lined notebooks, but dropped instead front and center in the middle of an otherwise empty page. As the losses accumulated, I found that the very act of drawing raised my spirits. I decided that if drawing made me happy when there was no reason in the universe for me to be happy, I had better pay attention to that impulse.  So, four months after graduation, with limited skills, a whole lot of grief masquerading as faith, and a small inheritance to subsidize the effort, I moved to New York to be an artist. I resolved to draw every day and show anyone who cared to look what it was I was working on.  Soon after settling on the Upper East Side, I came upon the Fifth Avenue book fair and impulse-bought a copy of “Hirschfeld On Line” — a wonderful collection of Al Hirschfeld’s theater drawings. The next morning, I flipped open the book for the first time to find not a drawing, but a photograph of Hirschfeld sitting in a theater seat, sketching.  An hour after seeing that photograph, I was at a diner with an acquaintance, who asked me, “What are you going to do now that you live in New York?”  “I’ve been thinking of sitting in theater rehearsals and drawing,” I replied.  This response was not considered and the process of thinking about it lasted as long as the train ride from 86th Street to Bleecker Street, but the man to whom I was talking, David Fuller, had just become head of the Jean Cocteau Repertory Theater and he suggested I try it with a production of Goldoni’s “Servant of Two Masters” they were to begin rehearsing the next week.  I spent the rehearsal period drawing at The Cocteau, much to the amusement of the cast, who indulged the experiment because I was presented to them as the dramaturg. Since no one knows what a dramaturg does anyway, they shrugged and let me draw. When the show opened, I had my impromptu gallery space in the lobby where, for the first time ever, I sold a drawing.  A few weeks later, walking up Madison Avenue, I quite randomly stumbled upon the Margo Feiden Gallery — then the exclusive distributor of Hirschfeld’s work — walked in wide-eyed and star-struck, and started a conversation with Nancy Dann, the manager of the gallery. I showed her my sketchbook. We kept in touch. Eventually she took me under her wing and showed my work to Hirschfeld’s wife, Louise, who liked my drawings and arranged a meeting for me with the artist himself on the top floor studio of their home on the Upper East Side.  And so it was that I climbed those stairs, handed Hirschfeld my work, watched as he pushed aside an in-process sketch to thumb through the pages of my sketchbook at his table and began a conversation with him about drawing.  A week after meeting Hirschfeld, my cousin Peter died and I flew to Phoenix for his funeral. In Phoenix, I met Peter’s ex-wife, Blaine, who overheard me telling my family the unlikely story of how I came to meet Al Hirschfeld. Blaine liked my drawings and asked if I would like to draw the dancers of American Ballet Theatre. I did not know the first thing about contemporary ballet, but Blaine was on A.B.T.’s board, so I politely lied and told her I did. A week later, I was sitting on the lip of the stage at the Metropolitan Opera House during a dress rehearsal of “The Merry Widow,” drawing.  “I never know what to tell young people when they come here. It could never happen for anyone they way it happened for me,” Hirschfeld told me the day I met him. “It was all an accident.” The better portion of a century earlier, Hirschfeld had been sitting in the audience at a Broadway performance, doodling on his playbill when the man next to him suggested that if he were to redraw the sketch on a clean piece of paper he would publish it in his newspaper. And that’s how that began.  “You learn your limitations and then you try to work within them,” Hirschfeld had said to me.  The first time I walked out and took a seat on the Met stage, with my pens and my paper balanced on my lap and the sharp pangs of those I had lost and all that I had abandoned reverberating within me, I didn’t know the first thing about drawing the human figure. I didn’t know anything about the dancers, the repertoire, the traditions or the way the chandeliers at The Met rise before every performance. But I did know about trying to make something lasting out of a sad story. It was here, watching the dancers of American Ballet Theatre with an empty page before me, I grew to trust the leap into the unknown.  Michael Arthur is a pen and ink artist who specializes in live drawing of theater, dance and music rehearsals. He is the archival artist of Joe’s Pub at The Public Theater in New York City and a member of the band Balthrop, Alabama. More work can be found at his Web site.
Driven by grief -- and a meeting with Al Hirschfeld -- a young artist follows his impulse to draw the world as he sees it.