Artwala Road

It was the last class of the winter session of our drawing club on Saturday and another cold, rainy day. Sally brought in a roll of brown paper so that we could draw bigger than we have in a long while. We’d been working quite small the previous two or three weeks, sitting around a table, chatting, painting with gouache. It was a companionable, wintry and very pleasurable way to explore making art. I wondered sometimes if I wasn’t allowing the class to be a bit too relaxed. Aren’t teachers supposed to crack the whip? Must be the renegade in me that says when things feel good let them be.

I know a drawing class is supposed to be about learning to draw but there’s a part of me that believes we already know how to do that. Children draw without any self-consciousness, freely and with imagination. It seems so hard for a lot of us to do that—when we first begin again anyway. I often think our class, in which so many wondrous things happen, is really just a place where we get comfortable so that what we already know and who we already are can come to the surface. On this Saturday we spent longer than usual in the downstairs room sitting around a table, showing pieces of art we’d completed, chatting, the raining pelting the windows.

Almost an hour had passed when we decamped to the third floor where we took over a rehearsal room for the theater because we needed wall space to tack up the big sheets of brown paper. We didn’t hurry. Everyone chose an image of something botannical from a file of photographs. We set the boxes of pastels out. I put the music on—The Be Good Tanyas, a Vancouver girl band who we’ve come to love, and we began.

It was a sneaky thing. I, at least, didn’t expect it. Maybe because we’d worked small for a while and experimented with scribbling, then painting. Maybe because we’ve become so companionable and supportive of each other on Saturday mornings or maybe because it was raining and we were warm and dry. Maybe because we were working large and right out of our comfort zones, somehow, by some grace, none of us cared and something magical happened. Every single person did something fantastic. Every single person took a big leap up. The thing is with art, once you take a big step forward, you don’t go back.

I can’t explain it really, but there it is. I was knocked out by what people did, by how willing everyone was to step up and give it a whirl and to not care and care at the same time. Afterwards we sat and looked at what we’d done. We tried to see what could still be done, where we still might go. It was the last class for the winter session. In two weeks, when we begin again, it will be spring. And that is truly the time of rebirth and growth. Practice, of course, makes more possible and we’ll soon practice again. Stay tuned!

March 19th, 2008 | Category: Drawing Club | Subscribe to comments | Leave a comment | Trackback URL