by Francesca Biller-Safran

Created on: July 29, 2008

Time has an odd and interesting way of standing still when you are a child. For hours and days I spent my youth drawing and sketching alongside my father, unaware that months and years had passed until they were already gone.

Strolling into the house after school, I looked forward to the sound of the tap-tap tapping of his paintbrush in turpentine. Today each time I gaze at a painting of his, I am reminded of that odd and familiar smell and of the swishing of his brushes; this is something he gave to me.

We didn't have to say anything to each other but sometimes we did. As the afternoon sun spilled through the lazy, long windows of his home studio, I would ask how long he had spent working on the persimmon or vase he happened to be painting. He never had an answer because he didn't know. He was just painting, lost in the shadows and shapes of the fruit and taking as much time as it needed.

Pulling my sketchbook off a shelf he had given me with his drawings left on random pages, I would quietly make myself comfortable amongst piles of old kimonos my mother gave him as backdrops for his still life's. Colors of silky deep purples, burnt oranges and muddy greens surrounded me on the couch as I got still for a long while to draw.

My favorite thing was to borrow from my father's art book collection and copy from them. Artists like Watteau, Degas and Leonardo da Vinci were my favorites, so lyrical and academic at once, my pencil glided easily as I attempted to mimic every stroke. My father taught me the art of patience and advised me not to look at the page as I drew and wait to see what I ended up with.

This taught me that what mattered was how the pencil felt in my hand, how to feel each sketch, and not waiver or worry at what the end result might be. I sketched for hours like this as I sometimes peeked at my drawings, maybe an hour or two into getting lost on the page.

We listened to strands of music on these afternoons that helped made my hand be more in composition, these afternoons when time stood still. Debussy, Dave Brubeck and Glen Gould percolated through the living room as it seemed we were the only two people in the world. I learned how to be still in the moment and how to listen to each note as a separate and yet fluid entity, just as each sketch mark turned out to be as important as my finished drawings.

I don't remember being bored when I was young- that was the one thing there was no time for. One Sunday when the house was especially quiet and calm, I took

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