As much as I love working with words, there comes a time when the right side of the brain—that quirky, creative, imaginative, artistic, deliciously un-logical hemisphere—needs a roll in the hay. We’re talkin’ some major stimulation. So I’m taking a drawing class at the School of Visual Arts, where, for three hours every Tuesday night, I sit in a cavernous studio with graffiti-covered walls and draw. Well, sketch, really, from a live model (which I’ve decided I definitely want to be one of these days, but that’s another story).

I’ve always been considered pretty artistic. I drew like a fiend when I was a kid and took a semester’s worth of drawing classes in college. Animals are my specialty; people come out looking like ill-proportioned aliens. Which makes this anatomy/figure-oriented class that much more challenging. It’s all about loose lines and relaxed arms and sweeping gestures versus rigidly rendered perfection. The last real drawing class I took was during my freshman year in college, so I’m a little rusty. But I thought at least I could look like I knew what I was doing till the technique came flooding back by, say, week three of the ten-week session. Please. Last class the instructor asked me what I do for a living. I told him (editor and writer), and he nodded knowingly. “I could tell,” he said, and proceeded to point out how I was thinking too much and trying to get things too precise and being way to analytical for my own good and resisting the flow. Damn.

His advice was a huge help, though. I’m definitely in there to learn, and the whole process felt a million times better after he set me straight. I got a little lost in sizing up angles of tilt and blocking out the real estate that the figure would take up long before any detail entered the picture. Bodies morphed into a group of connected points and angles and arcs—objective pieces that needed to be drawn for what they were, not for how I thought they should appear. (Oddly enough, a lot of the sketches I did of the model ended up looking a lot like me (long legs and arms, spindly fingers and toes, all straight lines). Huh?)

Bottom line is that the right side of my brain is getting a workout and it feels good. For as technical as art can be, it really is instinctual on a lot of levels. And who am I to argue with instinct?

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This entry was posted on Sunday, July 2nd, 2006 at 8:54 pm and is filed under Design/ Arts, Personal. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.