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.