What does mastery look like? Part 10: Drawing
Learn how to draw well. From life and my imagination.
Every generation thinks that Saturday Night Live was really good when they were teens, and that it’s just a bunch of crap now. The golden era for me was the Phil Hartman, Janet Hooks, Nora Dunn, Dana Carvey, and Mike Myers era. And one of my favorite bits on that show was Simon starring Mike Myers. Simon is a fictional BBC show about an irrepressible English boy who shows off the drawings that he has made while he, inexplicably, sits in his bath—this sounds like a perfectly plausible BBC show to me.
In each segment Simon shows off his increasingly troubling drawings that show what his life is like. Through the course of the sketches we learn that Simon’s mother has recently “gone to live with the angels” and that his distant father is criminally negligent. Simon always smiles, but his pictures express the horror of his life. For a sketch that was most famous for exhorting cheeky monkeys to not look at his bum, I loved how dark it was under its surface. I am almost certainly overanalyzing what was just a funny sketch from many years ago, but I always thought that the genius of that bit was that it let a child’s drawings tell the truth and express sadness and pain for him so that he could smile and laugh. So he could be a kid.
I think as kids, before we could really use our words eloquently, many of us drew our feelings. Children’s art therapy still uses drawing and painting as a way for a child to express hard to articulate thoughts and feelings. Like many kids I drew constantly as a child. Anywhere and everywhere. I did not worry too much if my drawings were perfect. Just that they showed what I wanted them to show. Especially when I wanted to show emotions, especially negative ones.
I was an early and avid reader as a child. Due to my mother constantly reading to me from birth (actually, she probably read to me in utero) and my voracious love of books, I already knew how to read when I got to kindergarten. But my hand-eye coordination was atrocious. In the words of my kindergarten teacher, the late, great Mrs. Hightower, “He can’t hop, skip, or jump, or bounce a ball, but he can read beautifully, and I don’t know why. Everything I’ve ever known says he shouldn’t, but he does.”
Reading was easy, but handwriting was terrible. I knew how to write my letters and numerals in Pre K, but I still wrote haphazardly when I got to first grade. Forming letters was difficult and slow for me, and I did not seem to be improving.**** I took to math, language arts, science and all of the other subjects, but handwriting was just hell for me. It was frustrating to the point of tears almost every day. It was certainly very frustrating for my homeroom teacher, Mrs. Orr to watch me flounder on something that should be simple, and that was simple for most of the other kids as well. I remember being yelled at and made fun of by her for my poor handwriting, being made to feel lazy, and being scolded to hurry up when we had to write in class, making sure the other kids knew just how slow I was.
I hated her guts. I’m not sure I knew what it really meant to hate, but I knew that I hated her. One day, I wrote, “I hate Mrs. Orr” in my giant scrawl on a piece of manilla paper, then drew a picture of her underneath it. I then shoved it in my desk and promptly forgot about it. Forgot about it until Mrs. Orr’s fortnightly flipping over and dumping out of my incredibly messy desk. You see, Mrs. Orr and I had a ritual.
There would be something I needed for class that I couldn’t find, like my Lefty scissors with the green rubber handles, and I would dig into my hoard and try to find them. I would pull random things out of the desk, become enchanted by each of them and then forget what I was looking for to begin with until I was asked if I found them yet. I would do this several times. Failing to find them, I would ask permission to get up from my desk and go look in my locker and backpack. Permission denied—she would then march to my desk and say, “They’re probably in this rat’s nest somewhere.” She would then dump my entire desk onto the floor and start tearing at the massive heap on the floor, and there would be my Lefty scissors, being used as a bookmark in a weeks overdue library book about the lions of the Serengeti. She would then yell at me to clean up this mess, and then remembering who she was dealing with, she would turn to my best friend since I was two, the ever-stalwart Stephanie Johnson to clean and organize my desk for me, and then she would say, “Maybe this time he’ll keep it clean!”
I didn’t.
It was during one of these desk purges, looking for a Big Chief tablet, or the order form for class photos etc. that Mrs. Orr happened upon the drawing where I told the world that I hated her. I was truly shocked and horrified when she ripped it out of the pile, and waved it in front of my face, “What is this!?” You see, by this point I had forgotten about ever having written that, and also forgotten that I hated her in that moment long past. Other than the handwriting and messiness, I was a good kid. I was never in trouble for being rude or talking back. I would never speak to an adult disrespectfully. Even when being berated, I would just repeatedly say, “I’m sorry, Mrs. Orr. I’m sorry.” I was saying that while apologetically balling, truthfully saying that I didn’t remember making that picture or writing that. My fury had long been extinguished through my expression. I had self-soothed with art.
I was in trouble.
Big time.
My foster sister, Mary, was in the same class as me and witnessed the whole ordeal, and I still remember her in her Brownie uniform, just flying out of the classroom to snitch to Mom that I was in trouble with the teacher. I don’t remember what my punishment was, it could have been a spanking and some grounding from t.v. (I never cared about that, because they didn’t ground me from books) or my Hot Wheels cars—now that was a serious punishment. I almost certainly had to write an apology note in my horrible chicken scratch. And I would have meant it. Because I did not actually hate Mrs. Orr. The only thing I really hated in first grade was spinach and having to watch the news.
I often wonder how Mrs. Orr is. If I make her look like a villain in this piece, it’s only to illustrate the fullness of overwhelming, inexpressible emotions that sometimes boil over in children. How I wish that Mrs. Orr had not seen the hurtful words that I wrote, but that she had seen the picture that I drew of her instead. I remember it being a very good picture. My anger had softened to the point of a kind of intense study of Mrs. Orr, and my picture reflected that. I wanted to know how to behave so that she would never be angry at me again, the negative attention of authority figures being the thing I feared the most in life. If she had seen the picture I drew, she would see a caring woman who sometimes lost her temper. A gifted teacher who was excellent at her job, but that occasionally lost her cool. A mother who undoubtedly had a million stresses to sort through away from school. A human being, flawed but good.
When I was young I could draw. I could use art to illustrate the world around me and inside my head, and I want to have that ability back in my life.
Somewhere between sixth grade, the last year I took regularly took art in school, and my thirties I lost my ability to draw. Just lost it. I did not take art in junior high and high school, opting to take band and drama instead. And I did not draw for pleasure any longer. I became too embarrassed at my childish rudimentary skills; I just stopped drawing altogether. I would try to pick it up from time to time, but I just became frustrated at my inability to draw well. To draw what I thought and felt. I was an artist once, and I am determined to be one again.
What that looks like:
I am going to complete, in the next few weeks all of the exercises in Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain, by Betty Edwards. It is a classic for forty years, because it works.
I am taking a painting and drawing class through the Chicago Park District at the park by my house.
I will draw every day for the next six months, taking my time and really letting myself learn to see like an artist.
I am also doing an online course through the library, but I can only get access for a week at a time, so it will be a supplement to my other study.
Then I will draw what I see in life and in my imagination.
Below are the pre-instruction drawings that I made. The first one, the wedge of cheese, is from my online course, and the other three are from Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain. I will compare them to drawings I make after I complete the work from Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain.
First drawing from my online course:
DRSB example 1, a self-portrait:
DRSB Example 2, Drawing of a person from memory:
DRSB Example 3, drawing my own hand:
***In eighth grade I was diagnosed with a learning disability, called dysgraphia. Dysgraphia makes the neuro-motor, fine motor skills, and spatial relationship of written language very hard for me. To a lesser extent, it makes the very act of turning thoughts into words difficult, much in the way that dyslexia is for writing. I still write incredibly slowly by hand, and I have a tiny bit of aphasia from time to time. My handwriting is not awful, but it’s not beautiful or elegant. Learning to type changed my life immediately. As soon as I was allowed to type my work, I was able to fully express myself in words.