A Frustrating Lesson

Monday's class had left me confident and energetic. I knew what I could achieve as long as I maintained my energy and sense of adventure. But something was amiss on Wednesday. Even after the gesture drawing warm-ups, I felt slow and clumsy, like writing block when the words refused to flow from my consciousness to my fingertips. Here, the images did not translate. Maybe it was the loss of the sense of urgency, like on Monday when we had to do line drawings very quickly.

On Wednesday we had longer sessions. The model posed for 20 to 40 minutes at a time. We had to sketch the gesture with vine charcoal, using the thick end, very quickly, within 30 seconds. Then we were asked to draw the contour of her body. We imagined that we were ants crawling slowly over the outline of the model, and our hands followed in suite. An important aspect of this exercise was to not just draw, let's say, an arm. Not to consciously register that it was an arm we were drawing so that we do not use our logical side to draw what we "think" or "know" an arm looks like. Instead, we were to really look at the lines along the arm and the curves along the uneven surface of the flesh.

What made this particularly hard was that while I concentrated on the contours, I lost track of the proportions. It was difficult trying to combine all the techniques into one. Shane also mentioned that the act of measuring the model was simply a technique to get us to start internalizing the proportions.


Wednesday's drawings also led to more "realistic" images than those on Monday. The more realistic a drawing is supposed to look, the easier it is to spot the flaws, especially pertaining to proportion. This one for example, made her look too narrow, and the arm is too thin.

It's easier to like Monday's drawings because of their abstract look. They can fool you to think that they are somehow "good."

I also began to tune into other people's frustrations. I heard sighs and "hmms." People twisted their mouths, wrinkled their noses, and shifted their weight. It seemed that we had hit a communal block in our art.



I also noticed that after drawing the male model, whose body was sinuous with muscles and bones, the female model was much smoother and much rounder. These smooth lines had a harder time taking shape on my paper. She's a thin woman, but after paying so much attention to the uneven contour of her body, she began to look fat and flabby. It made me wonder if all those pale fat bodies of women painted long ago were really actually rather thin bodies.



One off day. It was bound to happen. Like writing or jogging, these things don't just happen every day of the week. Art is so interesting! It's not purely cerebral, like the act of writing. The hard part about writing is most of the time, the words are already there, floating in my subconscious, and it sounds good in my mind, but the act of transcribing these words onto paper is like a strange kind of fishing. There in my mind, I have all the words that I need, floating and bobbing in the ripples of my subconscious, but sometimes I'm too slow, and I can't catch the words before they sink below the surface. Sometimes I'm too clumsy, and the words refuse to be pieced together, like an unfinished puzzle.

Drawing on the other hand is so much more physical. The cerebral aspect only enters as judgment: Is it proportionate? Does the arm angle this way or that way? Where do the shadows fall? But more so, it is the movement of my hand that creates a drawing. So much of it seems to be stored in the muscles and joints. If my hand is not familiar with this type of movement, then I lack balance and lose control, like a wobbly yoga pose. There also seems to be an element of faith, to trust the movement of your hand. To go for it. And if it's wrong, try it again. There's a need for so much more of a balance between logical judgment and well, I suppose you can just call it intuition. It's a struggle between control and letting go.