When I was 16, I went to the Rhode Island School of Design summer program. I arrived as a pretty insufferable and opinionated know-it-all — no doubt the reason my mother was eager to let me run off to Providence for a couple of glorious months of art classes and unsupervised dorm life.

One week, our design teacher gave us a tough assignment: use up an entire #2 pencil to create a single drawing. The next day, the classroom walls were lined with the results: sheets of paper grimy with graphite.

Except for mine — a delicate, ethereal image of a nude woman, rendered in the lightest possible shades of gray.

"Who did this?" the teacher demanded. I raised my hand proudly.

"The assignment was to use an entire pencil."

"Well, that’s what I did," I replied with a smirk. I explained how I'd ground the whole pencil - graphite, wood, even the eraser - into a fine powder. Then I’d made a painting with rubber cement, a Mucha-inspired figure. With an atomizer, I'd blown the pencil dust across the page, creating my ghostly image. Every pencil particle present and accounted for.

The teacher stared at me for a long moment, then said, "Very clever." It wasn't a compliment.

Huh. I thought I'd been brilliant. I'd found a loophole, a way to distinguish my masterpiece from everyone else’s art. I'd approached the assignment like I thought artists were supposed to—with a clever conceptual twist that demonstrated intellectual sophistication. I was prepared to deliver my exigesis with various commentary on manufacturing, on deconstruction in the modern age, on rule-breaking, on the power of less… The instructor's response left me baffled.

Throughout high school, I’d been taught that great art and literature were fundamentally about ideas—messages carefully encoded within works that the reader had to dissect and parse. Art was a puzzle to solve, a code to crack, with the greatest artists being the cleverest at burying secret meaning.

I loved Francis Bacon as a teenager. The distortion, the outrageousness, the gore. My art history teacher told us that Bacon's Painting (1946) was "about" Neville Chamberlain's capitulation to Nazi Germany and its effect on England — a veiled protest against the abuse opf power and hypocrisy.

But when I looked at that painting, what I felt transcended any specific historical moment. The visceral fear, the bloody violence, the sense of authority distorted into monstrosity — Bacon is all guts and balls, not brains.

If it’s just a commentary on 1940s British politics, then who cares? But Bacon is as powerful now as he was 80 years ago, because he captures something fundamentally human that can’t be parsed and reduced to bullet points.

If the arts really required this conceit, it paralyzed me. When I thought about majoring in art or literature in college, I imagined endless intellectual one-upmanship: urinals in galleries, haphazard paint splashes, dense theoretical justifications, historic allusions, symbolic backflippery.

Despite my cockiness, I didn't think I could muster that sort of originality and intellectual depth. More importantly, I wasn't sure I wanted to.

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I’m no longer the boy I was at sixteen. When I draw in my sketchbook now, I don’t try to address climate change or gender politics or corporate power. I'm not even trying to make something cool or attractive to look at. Instead, I just want to pull something authentic out of myself.

If you asked what my art is "saying," I‘d answer, "I dunno. I guess: ‘here I am, and this is what I made.’’ That simple answer would have horrified my high-school teachers, who expected five-paragraph essays on Joyce's symbolism or Bruegel’s hidden themes.

To me now, the true purpose of making art is to express aspects of my experience that resist intellectual categorization. The emotions, sensations, and perceptions that make us human can’t be adequately summarized by critics or boiled into artist statements. They exist in a realm that's holistic, emotional, spiritual, and non-verbal.

Art succeeds precisely where words and concepts fail.

I wish I'd understood this at 16, when I was grinding that pencil into dust, back in when I was so valued quick ripostes and obscure references, living deep in my head, but so disconnected from my own feelings. My ground pencil drawing was clever but without heart.

The irony is that my teenage self, so determined to prove my brilliance, was actually afraid. Afraid of the vulnerability that comes with authentic expression. Afraid of sitting with a pencil for hours, pressing it into paper with no clever shortcuts. Afraid of creating something that couldn't hide behind conceptual sophistication. Of being comfortably judged against my peers. Analytic intellectualization was so much easier.

I've spent decades finding my way back to this truth, that art isn't just what you think, but what you feel. Not just what you conceptualize, but what you experience. Not just clever ideas, but the raw, unfiltered truth of being human. If I could go back and remake that assignment now, I wouldn't atomize the pencil—I'd press it into the paper until my fingers ached, until the graphite became an extension of myself, until the drawing emerged not from my clever mind but from something deeper and truer.

Your pal,

Danny