The amazing thing is that when you start digging through boxes in the basement, you discover things you had completely forgotten! Years ago my sister, my niece and I took a drawing class together. Let me premise this by saying that my sister is a true artist, in every sense of the word, and my niece has shown great artistic promise from early childhood. I come from a family of artists and I am the runt of the litter when it comes to painting, drawing, etc. But I had been reading Drawing from the Right Side of the Brain (I cannot recommend this book more highly) and I thought it would be fun to take a class all together.
The best testimonial I can give for the method is this: the teacher was one of the most obnoxious, arrogant and unpleasant people the three of us had ever met, but the method itself is so wonderful that this was not enough to ruin the class for us. We enjoyed it tremendously, and I will now show you what I unearthed from the boxes and you can see for yourselves.
My first drawing
We were supposed to do a self-portrait or a drawing of a part of our body on the first day, to be compared with a self-portrait drawn on the last day to mark our progress. Well, you can judge for yourselves. I am no Picasso, but I still think I can see definite progress as time went on. By the way, it was hard. A lot of fun, very engaging, but very challenging. It required discipline and focus. Helpful in many ways.
A drawing from the third class
Then we investigated negative space. I found this class very inspiring, and I think my drawing was good too.
Negative space
Finally, we got to the end of the class, and I did my final self-portrait. It’s a bit dark, but I did capture a certain resemblance to myself. There’s something about it that I quite like.
My final self-portrait
I love portraits in general. I have an aunt who is an incredibly talented artist. She went through a period in which she painted a number of portraits. There is a marvelous one of her late husband, and one of a man in a tuxedo or some other fancy suit. They are my two favorites. All my life I have envied her that talent, and I have always thought, if I could paint like that, all I would do is portraits. A painted portrait is like a collection of photographs one on top of the other, as if you had put them through PhotoShop and made the layers transparent so you could see all of them all at once. The layers of a person’s expressions come out in a portrait because it takes a long time to paint it or draw it and a depth emerges that a snapshot cannot capture.
How does this fit in with the blog? Let me list the ways:
- Now that I have saved these drawings of mine, I am free to throw the originals away. Honestly, even if I keep them, will I ever look at them again? Will anybody? What would I do with them? They just fill the house with clutter.
- Finding them and thinking of that class and the pleasure it gave me reminds me of the importance of art in our lives; observing it, making it, thinking about it — all this adds many levels of appreciation for the beauty that is all around us.
Have any of you ever taken a class like this one? Have you read the book? I think it’s the best drawing method there is. From time to time I take the book off the shelf and try one of the exercises. It almost always gives me a headache, but I am truly able to lose myself in it, in a way that other activities do not allow.
If you have similar experiences to share, please leave a comment, send me a drawing, I’ll happily post it.
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{ 7 comments… read them below or add one }
Would you also throw the picture away, if there where a certain smell on it. I mean just like it is with books. The smell makes them often attractive for me. Whilst reading I always must put my nose in a book so now and then.
What is about the pictures? I know that you are good in letting things go, but do you really throw them away or have you changed your mind?
Ilaria, your final self-portrait is fortunately not the “final” one of your life. Maybe the portraits are now more in words than lines. There is something Ilaria about the drawing, and I like the proto-cubist feel of it.
Sherman! I didn’t know you had such a delightful blog yourself. I spent a little time there and I will definitely be going back. I’m going to subscribe, in fact.
Thanks for the comment!
Mario, I have not thrown them away yet, but I do think that something I will most probably never look at again should be discarded. I think about my death one day, not in a morbid way, but I do not want to leave my children with the burden of dealing with tons of “stuff.” As life goes on I just keep the minimum of things and get rid of everything else. We need so little in this life, and we always have much, much more than we need.
@Sherman,
You are totaly right. There is something about this picture. In fact it has nothing to do with the fact that it is a selfportrait. It’s just in one way or the other very impressive and that makes it a peace of art to me that shouldn’t be thrown away.
I like the way you described it.
Hi Turtle,
Here’s an idea for the drawings:
Take the few you think are the best. Cut them down, because I assume they are on large paper stock, and paste them into a blank book or sketchbook. (Use archival corners, or even acid free glue stick.)
That way you can keep your drawings as momentos, but they won’t need framing or protecting otherwise. And you’ll have more pages to fill when you find more stuff that might be worth saving.
Personally, my sketchbooks are the first things I’d grab in a fire (and you know we in SoCal think about fire often). And I’d hope your kids might love to have a self portrait of their mother someday.
kisses.
Hi Kloe,
thanks for the suggestion. I’ve never been the scrapbook type. Interestingly, though, I have saved a box a year for each child with all their school and art work for when they leave home to take with them. We call them the “memories”. Mom, put this in the memories, is a commonly heard phrase in our house.
kisses to you too