The Saturday Morning Drawing Club Resumes
On Saturday we started up again with the drawing class. I think of it as a club because most of the members have been together now for nearly two years. Of course, it was great to see everyone but also a challenge for me, the teacher, to create new experiences that give us all the opportunity to grow and shine. Art is not just about skills, I say, it’s about connection to spirit! We’re trying to get out of our own way.
We’ve been invited to participate in the Arsenal Center for the Arts summer exhibition—”What Is Your Story?” I’m thrilled about this because we are a group of women over the age of forty and we have stories! And every time we tell them we get a little closer to connecting with our spirits, to peeling off a layer of dross and stepping forward just as we are.
Many of our members are coming to art after raising children and in the midst of busy and successful careers. There is such a yearning to create and explore that gets squashed in ‘real’ life, so we gather every Saturday morning and draw. One new member expressed a vague concern that I don’t teach things like perspective or shading. The thing is I don’t know much about them even after making my living at art for twenty-five years. I tell them it’s why I was able to succeed—it was my own hand that was evident, the one I was given, and I didn’t have any sense that I ought to be anything other than I was. I never went to art school so was spared expectations. (There are advantages to going to art school but challenges too.) Even when our own hands are shaky or naive, they have such amazing beauty in them. No one really wants to study perspective—that’s what we have cameras for!
Our first story project will be around the subject of shoes. I felt we had to have somewhere to start. Why not the feet? The ground. Those humble slips of leather that carry us here and there. Those things we hunt for and pay big bucks for, that we sometimes feel pride in sticking one foot forward. Those things that pinch and give us blisters and make our feet ache when we’ve chosen the wrong pair. Everyone has a story about shoes. So next Saturday they’re all to bring in a few sentences about a pair of shoes in their lives in preparation to conceiving an art piece to bring the story into this world like a mother births a baby. Stay tuned.
So, for our first class I decided that what we really needed was to just make a mess, just take some big white paper and make a mess—throw our anger and frustration down on the page or our confusion, scribble, rip, spill, cut. I said now’s our chance to not be polite, to not be good. Let’s be BAD!!! I thought we’d do this for an hour then move on to actually draw something for the next two hours. But everyone became so deeply engrossed in this that we never moved on. Bit by bit the messes became more subdued, more peaceful, as everyone lost themselves in what they were doing. Very, very interesting, Watson.
January 24th, 2008 at 8:29 am
I’m awed and fascinated by your perspective — coming from years of making a living as an artist yet not, as you say, knowing much about things like perspective. When I first began painting a couple of years ago, I struggled with the whole issue of trying to make my paintings look a certain way. I’ve managed to get to a more balanced approach with painting, but now that I’m focused more on drawing (because I wanted to learn to draw “better”), I find I’m in the same dilemma: wanting my drawing to look like the object, or to look like what I have in mind, or to at least look like something. It’s such a challenge, and also a gift, to be able to just let things be what they are, as they appear on the page, and not get caught in judgments, positive or negative.
And I hope you keep sharing the process you take the club through around the story project…I’d love to explore from afar!
January 24th, 2008 at 4:48 pm
Hi Julie! Thanks for sharing!! I think artists all struggle with this at some point. At first we are trying to get the skills to have things look as they are. That just takes practice but, in truth, a drawing is just marks on paper and they are beautiful in their own right. It’s pretty cool just to be where we are with our drawings, see what’s there and go in the direction of what pleases and excites. And it’s extra cool to just draw for the sake of it without product in mind—to really explore!
I will continue to share the story project!! Keep checking in and sharing your stories too! I’m so interested to hear your take on things!!
January 28th, 2008 at 2:38 pm
mdf. Well done. I so wish I could be in your club. Could I maybe have a exercise now and then to play with??
This weekend the town was dedicated to my friend the artist Rose Hilton. Rose is in her mid 70’s and lives in an unheated cottage on the edge of a cliff in Botallack Moor, a few miles from Pz. Tate St Ives celebrated her with a retrospective opening on Sat night, followed by a show of drawings here in town on Sat. Her work is all wacky figurative and beautifully painted. (Tate St Ives/google). The drawings thrilled me the most…so free and expressive, mostly in either pastel or pen and ink, some just scratched out in less than a minute.
Rose was turned out head to toe in a full length slinky blk patent leather fitted coat dress (the only way I can describe it) and a massive blk leather dog collar piece with studs. Not her usual style but she allowed her girlfriend from art school to dress her. Anyway she looked stunning as if just stepping off the set of The Matrix! This is all leading somewhere….. Rose raised 2 boys while being married to a v. abusive husband who declared there was to be only one painter in the family…HIM. He was Roger Hilton. And it wasn’t until Roger died of alcohol when Rose was in her 50’s that she took up the brush again.
So come on girls! Let it rip!
January 28th, 2008 at 9:58 pm
Hey K! That is soooooo FABULOUS!!!! I truly wish I’d been there! Checked out the Tate St Ives and saw Rose’s beautiful painting. Good for her! And all of us! No one can hold a spirited girl down for long. I think we need a book where we all tell our stories accompanied by a piece of our art. Thanks, mdf. I just cracked up when I read it.:)))
Will think of a drawing exercise you can do too…You are part of the club!! When you next come to Boston you can be guest teacher!