News — Process

I love making goals. Revisiting this list every few months helps me see how important it is to do just that, revisit. It helps me see that the small steps I’m taking do add up. Here’s the 2016 goal check in.

Today was the last day of my first real art class. Sure, I’ve taken drawing classes before but I’d categorize all of them up until this point as failures. Failures because I left the quarter (or the three classes I made it through before quitting) feeling worse about drawing than I did when I started.

Sometimes it takes awhile.

It was worth the wait.

You don’t have delve very deep into the world of art until you come across the human figure. Bodies are fascinating subjects. We all have them. They consume a lot of our lives in one manner or another. Therefor we are all innately interested in bodies and bodies in art is part of a rich artistic tradition.

I’ve wanted to try figure drawing for a while but like many things with drawing, fear stopped me. Fear of tools. Fear of protocol. Do I use a drawing horse or a easel? What even is a drawing horse? What if my drawings are really bad? What if I get bored after 5 minutes? What if I don’t have the right materials?

Each of those questions a reason to never pay the $15 for a three hour session around town.

But yesterday, that ended. Because yesterday in drawing class, we had a live model and it was glorious. Glorious!

I do most of my drawings from photos and the amount of information you have in real life is drastically different than staring at a photo.  Real life is so much richer. You have an essence of the person in front of you but the curve of the body and the angles of the form seem so much more immediate with a live model.

The human body is made up of complicated shapes and forms. But they also offer incredible opportunities for expression. I cannot wait until our next live model class, and in the meantime, there’s a life drawing class on Friday in Portland, and I’m planning on showing up ready to have a great time making some terrible drawings.

Experimentation. It's so important. And yet, often it's really hard to do. You start to like what you see under your fingers and suddenly the journey becomes more about not messing it up and less about creative discovering. You're working against something as opposed to toward something. That's a terribly, terrible way to create. Even worse, it almost guarantees you won't learn anything. Because anything that deviates from what you have won't be seen as a jumping off point but instead as a sharp veer toward disaster. This is one of the main reasons I love these 100 day projects. You've created a space for you to make terrible art. And in that space, you can make amazing discoveries.

I've found that certain pattern sizes work best on my 8x8 floral squares. But last night I was running out the door to my art group. I hurriedly grabbed some easy-to-transport stencils, but I didn't snag any of my usual go-tos. Instead I had the one you see above. And when I laid down the paint I immediately regretted it. I felt that twinge you do when you think you're on a roll and then think the roll has slammed squarely into a wall.  I panicked a bit. (As you do.) Added a glaze of white to calm the crazy busy background down and then, resigned, started to add my pen lines. And you know what? I freaking loved it. Loved it. I loved the modern feel it gave the piece. I loved all the hard, angled edges surrounding the soft curves of the flowers and leaves.

And it was another reminder that play is such an integral part of creativity and artistic growth. Sometimes it’s in small ways like discovering that a new pattern will work with a current style. Maybe it’s something bigger. But we can’t get there if we don’t genuinely allow ourselves the space to make mistakes.

Today in class, we spent the entire drawing session on one face. Starring, mark making and drawing lights and darks. The day had been kind of crappy up to this point, but I was already in love with my photograph’s eyes. Those eyes. Eyes! I love eyes.

Charcoal to paper. It felt good. A little light here a a little dark there. And then I got to the nose. My eyes were too close together and so my measurements didn’t translate. Plus either from being worn or the lighting, there wasn’t a lot of great information about the nose. My brain, being ever so thoughtful, decided to jump in to help. But slowly, my brain started reeling between what I could see on the page and what I thought I should be able to see on the page and in between frustration mounted. Mounted and mounted.

And let’s be honest, today wasn’t great anyway. I’m locked into this thinking-about-Mom cycle. The miss has been pretty deep the past few days and it’s in the quiet of drawing where I feel it most often. So to be standing in class, cascades of charcoal billowing around me, a terrible drawing forming before me, I kind of wanted to scream. But I kept working. My new friend in the class, Debbie, clipped her drawing to the wall. It was beautiful. The greys, which I couldn’t seem to handle today were delicate and expressive. The eyes were soulful. The lips were LIPS. She even had rendered the shadows of the glasses beautifully. We’re not suppose to compare but boy, was I now. Everything she had succeeded doing, my drawing lacked.

When Phil our instructor called time, I almost said out loud a loud, “Thank God.”

“Come talk to me if you’re experiencing trauma,” Phil said both jokingly and seriously.

I walked straight to the sinks. There, Debbie asked me how today felt.

“It felt pretty bad,” I said honestly. It felt good spending 90 minutes working on one face but emotionally (ego wise), it felt pretty bad. “Yours looked amazing,”I continued. “You’ve got to feel pretty good about it.”

The slightest of snorts came from my right. I looked over to her.

“Wait,” I said. “You don’t like yours?”

The look on her face said that she hated it. Hated herself. Hated everything about today. It probably looked a lot like my face’s expression.

I started to object but instead I just started to laugh. And she started to laugh. And good God us humans are complicated and learning to draw is hard.