A local art school – a serious art school, with a classical art training program (as opposed to a design or fashion institute) – held it 12th Annual Drawing Jam last weekend. It was my first time attending; I may not be the last person to learn of this event, but how I missed this for the last 11 years I don’t quite know. Oh, maybe it’s because I’m not an artist. But that is no reason I shouldn’t take part in a 12-hour day of drawing, painting and sculpting.
The event promised a sculpture room, an art room for kids, another for teens, models in costumes (such as our local favorite Pirate troupe, a woman draped in gold and green scarves and a magnificent headdress, and a portly knight weighted down in the tiny silver rings of his chain mail), models barely clad, models in only g-strings and white body powder, models completely nude – in static poses or in poses that changed every minute. A self-portrait room filled with mirrors. A room with elaborate floral displays, so that no matter where you sat around the table, you’d have a different floral still-life to view. A room filled with plaster casts, not exactly the most exciting room if you ask me, but tell that to the people crammed in, drawing from cast models of headless Greek women, a horse head, a human foot, and a bust of a Roman emperor.
The air was filled with excitement. Musicians played in many of the rooms. It was a Disneyland for the senses, complete with lines to get in to the best “rides.” You can only imagine what serious artists can do at an all-day creative amusement park. So much beauty, so much art, so many artists. And me. And my friend.
No matter how many times in my life I’ve picked up a sketch book and some quality charcoal pencils, taken myself to beautiful vistas, and drawn, the results are fairly consistent: I’m not very good at this thing called drawing. Or painting. I’ve tried that a few times, too. Every writer has their semi-autobiographical first novel, and every artist eventually gets to female goddesses, but that’s the extent of where I’ve gotten. That, and once I drew a fairly decent tree, with a trunk and branches that actually seemed tree-like.
I was the lone non-artist in attendance at an all-day drawing event. I can’t draw, but that didn’t stop me. I tried every kind of paper they offered. Pencils and charcoals and pastels and things I have no idea what they really were. I drew lines. I tried shading. I tried smudging. I looked straight ahead at every nude (although I did wish one model didn’t make eye contact while he was up there, sans all). I tried to draw muscles, folds, flabby skin, fat, bones evident under skin, the shadows made by belly buttons. I omitted nipple piercings, tattoos, and self-inflicted scars (not mere cuts on arms or wrists, but one woman’s intentional self-branding of a heart on her chest – I briefly pondered the state of affairs that a classical art training school would have models whose bodies no longer approximate any type of classical beauty, then I got right back to task). I tried to draw every part of the models in my view: hair, cheeks, lips, eyebrows, breasts, buttocks, and, yes, even genitalia. During a session of full nudes, my easel was set in a way that I couldn’t see one man at all (I only realized he was there after the tableau paused for a short break, and up he stood, emerging from behind a sea of easels), and the other was man was facing the people by the window; his penis wasn’t in my view, so I didn’t draw it. I had a shaved vagina right smack dab in my sightline, some fabulously paunchy bellies, one amazingly full and round set of breasts and several sets of sagging, flattened ones – tons of genitalia, yet no Full Monty model for me.
After a few tries, I gave myself permission to omit feet and hands, as it turns out I really can’t draw feet or hands. Come to think of it, I really can’t draw faces. Eyes. Ears. Bulbous noses. Beards. Musculature. Movement. Knees. Elbows. Buttocks. Lines and proportion elude me. Form isn’t quite right. My perspective is off.
And yet. I had a great day. My friend and I laughed and giggled and gawked at the real art and managed to say things like, “let’s go to the naked people room after this,” without bursting into embarrassed laughter. And then we each tried to draw – live art from live models. We drew from the models, we drew the other artists drawing the models. We drew and drew and drew. It was invigorating; the mere act of creating completely overshadowing the quality of what we created.
We had an initial agreement that there was no criticizing the crappy art we were likely to produce, as neither one of us considers ourselves artistic. So we were free to appreciate the sincere efforts we each made, to find the humor and humanity in our attempts, and to support our bravery despite what turned out on the page.
Even though we didn’t go in the kids’ art room, we were the kids that day. Most of the rest of the grown-ups we saw had the look of the serious artist about them – and the gear: portfolios and their own tins of supplies. We had enthusiasm, eagerness, and a child’s awe and delight to start with nothing and make something.
I am so deliciously proud of the work I did, even though it is likely a winning contender for the prize of the worst art made by anyone there – including the kids in the kid room. I took advantage of the program’s willingness to digitally scan two works and email them back to the let-me-put-this-in-quotes “artist.” I’m fully aware that what I produced is nothing at all like the quality of representational art on the easels all around me. I was surrounded by people with the capacity to create great art, who did create great art; I merely showed up, did something I don’t usually do, and found a part of me I enjoy, even if I’m as bad at this as I am at bowling (here’s the kid reference again – I need the bumpers up when I bowl, or I play ten frames of gutter ball).
I showed the drawings to my husband and my son, with the warning that they couldn’t laugh, and the reminder that I have had no training and less skill, so I don’t really know what I’m doing. I had the audacity to point out to them “what I was trying to do” on each one – how I was trying to capture a particular arc of an arm, trying to get the shape of the legs, trying to figure out where, exactly, knees and elbows go, trying to see what the materials would yield. Honestly. Bless these two men-among-men, they mostly didn’t laugh.
I should have just left it the way I do with my son, and the way I’ve appreciated his “art” over the years – with a healthy respect for the time and the willingness to make something out of nothing, even if that something doesn’t look much like what you hope it will. Life was happening while it was being made, and that, perhaps, is what art looks like.
Arc of the arm
Experimentation with form
A Real Artist
Sounds like a great day!