Paperwork: What is it that magically moves the hands of an artist?

My dad began drawing when he was a kid. He had the gift.

That’s what I called it. I think that’s what a lot of people say if they struggle with art. Those who have “the gift” make it look so easy.

It’s a simplistic way to explain how some people can draw or paint or sculpt or create works of art with some ease. At least it seems that way. (And it probably isn’t.)

I wanted the gift. I took art lessons, which were useful in terms of tools and techniques. But I still had to create the image.

I wonder if it’s unfair to explain artist’s achievements as a gift, like some magic ability. So I stopped looking at it like a mechanical skill.

As a teen I’d sneak down to my dad’s basement “studio” to study his oil paintings and admire his “gift.” I became attached to the majestic appaloosa horse he painted gazing across a valley terrain from a grassy hillside next to a line of rocky outcrops.

I’d walk away puzzled. How does he know where to shadow those powerful muscles and ... well, how does he make it look so real? It dawned on me eventually that Dad painted what he sees. What he sees.

Should I stop saying he had the gift? Instead, he had “the sight.” He could draw things because he saw them in his mind’s eye. He did not see a blank canvass. He saw an image and figured out how to build it.

Oh, like any creative project, it pulls you in surprising directions. He told me once that when carving wood you often go where the wood tells you to go. But still, I think he could see what he was creating. In detail.

What he saw was not always what I saw. I often looked at this paintings with people and I thought they did not look real enough. Many had misshapen faces. I thought.

I realize now he painted people as he saw them. It makes sense, does it not? I still don’t understand Pablo Picasso but, no doubt, he painted what he saw ... or how he saw things. And wasn’t French Impressionist Claude Monet half blind? But he gave us a world of comfort through color and shape.

“Beauty is in the eye of the beholder.” Artists know that. But you could say it begins through the eye of the creator. Which is why art is so powerful and valuable.

Music helps us hear the beauty of sound. Words trigger imagination.

And I think art helps us see what we are looking at. That sounds strange because I do see what I am looking at. So let’s say art helps us see what we don’t see, even when we’re looking right at it.

Think about how art or music or anything creative comes together. Artists paint what they see. Musicians orchestrate what they hear. The beauty is in the multitude of differences.

I should consult artist friends – about their vision before creation. I could be way off base. Which is OK. I can still be amazed at what artists produce.

And I can still say my dad had “the gift.”

• Lonny Cain, retired managing editor of The Times in Ottawa, also was a reporter for The Herald-News in Joliet in the 1970s. His Paperwork email is lonnyjcain@gmail.com. Or mail The Times, 110 W. Jefferson St., Ottawa, IL 61350.