To my dear readers,
I took an intensive figure-drawing workshop with my mom this week. The class included a “two-day pose” where I spent two, full, eight-hour-long days on a single drawing of a nude model.
I never considered myself a “figure drawer” or even a drawer. I spent my life thinking “I am bad at drawing.” I developed this opinion young. My journal from when I was eight recently surfaced where I wrote, “I can’t draw.” Under the confessions was a sketch of my childhood dog. It looked horrific. It looked outrageously like a short alien rather than a black lab.
Any psychologist could tell me this is problematic. I don’t care.
I still am just as judgmental of myself. When my paintings don’t match up with the image in my head, I am deeply annoyed. I can’t stand it. This is one of the reasons I keep painting. If I just finished every painting perfectly the first time, what would be the point?
But for some reason, when it is just a drawing, the feeling of annoyance is too much. I feel exposed when the drawings are too far from what I picture. Drawings are vulnerable. My annoyance was so high that I did not draw for years. I was determined to be an “artsy kid” without taking a single drawing class. I took ceramics and photography in high school. And in college, I stuck to sculpture and installation art.
I was forced to take printmaking my senior year and I avoided drawing at all costs. Even though printmaking is a drawing-based medium. I used grids, tracing paper, and projectors. Never allowing myself to be alone with a pencil and paper.
During darker moments, I consider this drawing phobia to be proof that I wasn’t a “real artist”.
Most of my New Year's resolutions for the last 10 years included “learn to draw” (after equally absurd things like “read every day” and “do clapping push-ups”). We have a fat stack of how-to-draw books hidden away in the corner of our apartment. It includes classics like “How to draw what you see” but also some weird ones purchased out of desperation, like the one that the FBI uses to make composite sketches of suspects.
When we had company over, I would stash them all under the couch.
God forbid a dinner guest discover my insecurity.
Before starting grad school, I spent hours at our kitchen table, trying to draw the best cube or nicest sphere. I drew our couch over and over, trying to make it “perfect”.
In my mind, being good at drawing had a very narrow definition. It meant photo-realistic representation. I worked in the arts in New York for over five years and have seen thousands of art shows. I can look at a tissue on the ground and find a way to think of it as “art” but show me one of my drawings and I become as conservative as a midwestern mom looking at modern art at MoMA. If it doesn’t look like a Rembrandt, it is trash.
I even TA’d a drawing class taught by an abstract painter. Every day she drilled home the idea that everyone could draw. Drawing was a skill anyone can learn. Photorealistic drawings were boring. It was about the process. What it looked like didn’t really matter.
She thought every drawing the students made was beautiful. If they tried at all, it was going to be amazing. That charcoal smudge on the corner of the paper– stunning. The skewed perspectives and distorted figures– just fantastic.
None of this sunk in.
I wanted to be able to draw “well”. Even Picasso could draw the human figure beautifully! He was trained at an Atelier (by his art-teacher dad) before going abstract. He chose to go abstract. He wasn’t forced to do it because he couldn’t draw any other way.
So, on the note of Picasso, back to my figure drawing class with my mom.
I was anxious about the workshop. I pictured myself standing there, a nude model in front of me, sketching out distorted figures that looked like deformed bubble people. Everyone would know I was a fraud. That I couldn’t draw. The teacher would whisper to me, “You should just get a job in marketing.”
But a true miracle happened. Maybe it was because my mom was there. But when I put my pencil on paper and followed the instructions of the teacher, my drawings looked… okay! They were not going to win any awards. No one was calling me Picasso (yet). But when I stood next to them, I did not feel ashamed.
I mean yes, my final drawing after the two-day pose did look a little strange. I couldn’t get her head to not look like it belonged to a hundred-year-old woman, even though the model was 25. But, her body looked human and that was all I could ask for.
And maybe more than anything, it gave me hope. Hope that if I kept trying, and kept drawing, one day I would be able to do it.
And that is my inspirational newsletter for the week.
Thanks for reading!
Best,
Claire
What’s for Dinner?
It is a holiday weekend so Los Tacos No 1 with some friends. Brats for the 4th though, don’t worry.
I'm only just realizing that I've never seen your drawings before.
Driving to Columbus OH, reading your Sunday night dinner, realizing how many things I don’t know. We have to thank Dan Thompson for his instruction! And both of our drawings were better because we took the class together :)