learning art

When I was about 11 and 12 I took some art classes. I had a great teacher, he was patient, passionate, and I always thought he was so smart. He pushed us to draw what we saw, and he really pushed us to be good at it. I used to have a problem with drawing my subject too small on my large piece of paper. One day, I was particularly struggling with that. After lecturing me a bit about it, he went to the back supplies room and came back with an even bigger sheet of paper and a gigantic black marker. He told me to draw bigger with the help of these new materials. I thought he was so silly for thinking that a big marker would actually make me draw bigger. It's not the marker which makes the drawing bigger, I thought, it's the movement of my arm. Eeesh. But I found that once I got back to drawing, it actually helped me to draw bigger. Not because of the new tools he gave me, but because of the point he made with it.

He would also talk about the space between the subjects that we draw. I remember at a parent-teacher night, I watched him as he talked to other parents about his techniques. He was talking to them about how he focuses on the parts that most of us don't see: the spaces between everything. He said that's the trick for replicating real life accurately. You draw the spaces in between the objects - that way you're not drawing the object the way you think it should look. Instead you're focusing on what you don't know - the spaces. And so you study it and draw it more attentively.

He also would say that drawing something is 80% looking at your subject, and 20% looking at what you're drawing. I hated when he told us that. I didn't want to spend all my time looking. But I always listened to him, because I knew he was smart and I believed he was always right.

He also never allowed us to use an eraser. He said erasers made us lazy. Instead, he wanted us to learn from our mistakes, and to draw knowing we can't erase it.

For many years after I stopped taking those classes, I still held on fervently to what he taught us, believing in it all. Some of it I still do, but now there are certain things I'm starting to not hold so much as absolute truth. Yet, nevertheless, I hold his passion and fervency as truth. It's not what he taught us... it's how he believed it and how he "preached" it to us. And that transmission is what stuck with me.

too many shoes?

So I went shopping for shoes today. Didn't find anything. Augh. I think part of it was because of my new revised budget and I now have a heighten sense of what's a Need and what's a Want. Lately I've been thinking about how much we live in excess, and how it's so relative, even within our small city (not just in relation to all the other countries and economic states). I heard of a girl who has 40 pairs of shoes lining her front entrance. But I also know of other people who get by with only 2 pairs of shoes all summer.

Excess can be in many different terms too - not just in material things. It can be in food, in habits, even in complaining about excess! When does avoiding to live in excess become excessive?

And then I see some who don't worry about not buying too much, but at the same time, don't worry about having to have every single thing they can get. I love those people. They're just ok with who they are, and they're not so focused on themselves and their habits. Sometimes you just gotta let it ride...

So no shoes for me. But maybe a new pair of jeans next week. I'm still working on not being so excessive with all my analyzing about excess.

Voters' Power

I went from not wanting to vote, to feeling obliged to vote, to being pressured to vote, to feeling guilty for not caring, to realizing that I can vote for the sake of something other than the various parties.

So I voted. I trudged through the rain, with the outer shell of my supposedly waterproof (but not) winter jacket, with ankle-wet pants, and my voters paper in my hand. (and my gimp sibling using my shoulder as a crutch). I exercised my right to vote. And exercised my legs on the way.

And I only did it so that I could demonstrate my power as a voter - not the power to choose who I want to rule this province - but the power to even be able to vote. So whoever wins, I don't really care -- it's more the fact that we are a democratic society, and I want it to be known that the people care about voting. (even though I may not care about who I'm voting for).

Is that bad? At the end of the day, I reasoned that any reason to vote is better than a reason to not vote.