Title: How Marcie got her groove back
I started my drawing class yesterday. This is a figure drawing class that meets once a week for eight weeks at CU Boulder. I signed up for the class on very short notice (about four hours worth) after looking it up in early January and promptly forgetting it existed until yesterday afternoon. Let's hear it for my short-term memory. Yay!
So last night I set foot in a university fine arts building for the first time since graduating in 1996. It was slightly surreal for me. I had my laptop bag over one shoulder and a brand spanking new drawing board gripped in the other hand. In my bag was a hastily assembled collection of pencils, erasers, charcoal sticks and Conte crayons. (Thank you, Art Hardware.) I felt like someone who left a small town for the big city years before, and returns on short notice. I felt like a college student again, except I never had this much money to drop on supplies when I was in college. And I didn't have a pager and cell phone and laptop hanging off of me -- the tools of my trade, which effectively stamp the label "TECHNOYUPPIE" across my forehead. The last time I toted an art board across campus, I was wired up on too much caffeine and ragged out in a pair of sweats, a flannel shirt, running shoes and a backwards baseball cap. There was too little time until graduation and I still had most of my year's work hanging up in the art building, waiting for me to retrieve it before the campus closed down for quarter break and I walked across my soon-to-be alma mater's campus for the last time as an undergrad.
Now I was returning to academia, if only to dip my big toe in the ocean and not dive in face first like the last time I was on campus as a student. I wasn't in sweats and flannel; I wore neatly pressed chinos and a button-down shirt, and an access badge to my office. How ironic is it that I started off as an anti-social art kid, morphed into a member of the rat race, and had to search to find my way back to the beginning?
I finally found the building and Ian left to go hang out at the sub shop across campus. A rather attractive, but befuddled young lady and I went in search of the classroom, and finally found it at the top of an echoing staircase. It looked like every other art room at every other campus in the world: flat drawers for keeping oversize drawings, a chalkboard in the corner, some random pencil scribblings on the expansive walls, drawing tables in a circle around the perimeter of the room... and everywhere, dust. Art rooms are always dusty, no matter how much you clean them. Charcoal, graphite, plaster and reams of paper leave their mark.
The room was fairly crowded; the class looked full. I got in just under the wire with registration, so I wasn't surprised. The instructor, Sandy, a perky blonde who can't be much older than me, did the usual "go around the room and tell us why you're here" trick. To my amazement, almost half the room works in computers or electrical engineering of some type. I think the malady of needing more out of life than geekdom is more common than it seems.
We started out with some gesture drawings, just to get warmed up. "Draw small," Sandy advised. Draw small? I have a problem with that... I'm incapable of drawing small. Drawing small to me means using only half of an 18"x24" page instead of the whole thing. It was a futile effort; I gave up on it and used the whole page. Hey, newsprint's cheap.
It didn't take long for me to fall into the groove so familiar to me. I draw standing up for a reason, and I felt my arms and hands responding to the sweeping gestures that ten-second poses require. Drawing is a total-body experience when you do it right. I got charcoal all over my hands, smudging my fingers into the paper, throwing my hips into a particularly broad stroke with the charcoal and dancing back from the paper to get a good look at the whole page. I swayed back and forth drawing the line of the model's shoulders, sweeping down to the hips and sketching out a thigh before moving down and outlining a foot in hard, choppy strokes.
If this sounds like a sexual experience, well, it was. Art is that to me. It sounds like a cliche, but it's true. Cynthia says I'm getting my spiritual groove back. I think she's right. By the end of class I had charcoal all over my hands, all over my shirt, smudges on my arms, and a big old grin on my face. I felt... really good.
Can't wait til next week.
-- marcie.