To anyone else, it was just a simple white cotton bag, but to me, it was a canvas (油画布) for my latest masterpiece. I laid it flat on the six-foot-long wooden table in my kitchen. With one hand I held down a corner of the bag and with the other clipped my brush in the paint and touched it to the canvas, and slowly an image took shape. Painting was hard, but I enjoyed it. And my friends and family loved the bags. “I get tons of praise for mine,” my mother told me.
Only getting those paintings appreciated was quite not the honor I’d dreamed of when I first picked up a paintbrush as a kid. I used to aim higher. I wanted my work to appear in the Louvre Museum in Paris, right next to the Mona Lisa. But even then, I knew what a wild dream it was.
My parents encouraged my interest, and paid for art lessons. In high school, I joined an art club, and showed my work along with other local artists in an exhibition. I started college and majored in fine art, took classes in drawing and design. But the farthest I ever traveled to was New York City. The Louvre might as well have been on another planet. Then things changed. I met and fell in love with Charlie. After we got married, I took a break from art.
When I finally picked up a brush, I was rusty and lost my inspiration. I tried a landscape but it was flat. Things in the foreground were the same size as in the background. I’d lost the ability. I was frustrated and threw down my brush. Maybe I’d never really had any talent at all. Charlie turned me around. “You have a talent,” he told me. “Keep painting.”
Paragraph 1 :
One day, walking through town, I found some white cotton bags in a store window.
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Paragraph 2 :
The next month, Charlie and I visited the Louvre Museum in Paris.
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