Chock full of Nature's warm, healing catharsis

At last, something I'm halfway qualified to write about!

And I'm not just saying that — I'm literally halfway qualified, having finished two years of a four year degree in art at a very prestigious art school. The sort of place rich people send their youngest kids — the ones that are obviously too stupid, spoiled or flaky to hack it as accountants or biochemists. I was hoping for an education with a little more meat on it...but let's not get ahead of ourselves.

I have wanted to be an artist since I was a wee slip of a weasel. By coincidence, art was also one of the few professions that was socially acceptable for a girl in my sort of family. Which is to say, an old Southern family which had spent most of its generations paddling around the shabby end of the shabby-genteel continuum. No-one is as class-conscious as the marginal.

Acceptability wasn't appealling, of course. But I watched my mother paint, and I burned to be able to do such a marvelous, showoffy thing. (As I yearned to be able to play Lady of Spain on the banjo like my father, but...we'll discuss it another time). My mother had genuine ability and had had proper training in her youth. She had more native drawing skill than I and could capture a likeness. She could've done something with all that, I'm sure. But she approached everything with the languid ambition of a house cat: "tell you what — I'll lie here on the windowsill, you tell me how wonderful I am."

I suspect I take more after my father's side — what we lack in talent we make up for in brute enthusiasm. I've had to work at it pretty hard.

When I was about 14, I got an afterschool job shelving books in a very big, very old university library. This gave me access to all sorts of books, including art books that weren't in general circulation because of their age, condition or rarity. (Or rudeness. I particularly remember one book on erotic South American pottery. Oh, the soup tureen!).

I learned there was a whole twilight world of geekery that existed within the world of art. A whole world of alchemy, paint chemistry, pigments and adhesives, ancient rumors, grounds and supports, rules of thumb, mechanical drawing aids, devices, doohickies and secrets. Why, it was sorcery and pretend science rolled into one! "Yo ho ho," I thought, "a technician's life for me."

And that's how it stood when I went away to art school: I had a great deal of theoretical knowledge but needed guidance, and as much life drawing experience as I could get.

Poor, naοve weasel

I only applied to one school, because I was told it was the best. If they didn't think I was good enough, I thought, to hell with it. I'll learn to drive the big rigs. But I did get in. And I knew enough about the current state of the art, at least, to know I wasn't getting myself in for a traditional apprenticeship, but something a good deal less Rembrandt and more Kandinsky.

My very first class on my very first day was held on the top floor of a beautiful early Victorian building. It had high, high ceilings and large, handsome windows all the way around, with corkboard-lined walls below and little gradeschool style desks.

The teacher (whose name I have scribbled out of my mental address book with a big black crayon) tells us to go to our rooms and come back at 10 am with drawings that evoke the idea of cubeness. Yuh-huh. Okay. I can do that.

I go away. I come back two hours later with drawings of naked men perched on invisible cubic things (I never missed an opportunity to work naked men into my general theme). We tack our drawings on the wall. The teacher paces back and forth in front of them and frowns.

"Stand up," he says to all of us at last, "stand up in the middle of the room."

We do that thing.

"No, closer. Stand closer together."

We do that.

"No, not you," he says, pointing to this one guy, "you go stand over there by yourself. The rest of you huddle as close together as you possibly can."

We are now much closer than a roomful of unacquainted co-ed eighteen-year olds is voluntarily inclined to stand. We are touching. We start to sweat a little. We shuffle our feet. The teacher lets us simmer for a while, then begins to gesture and scream.

"Sheep!! Sheep!!! Look at you! You're all a bunch of stupid goddamned sheep!"

We look at each other. "Wow!" we think. "What the b-a-a-a-a?" Then he pulls the guy over, the one he'd singled out, and starts heaping praise on him for being something admirably less ovine than the rest of the flock. The object of his attention has this little shit-eating grin, like he knows just exactly what he did to deserve it.

It takes a while, but we finally get it. We'd tacked our artwork up on the same wall. But all four walls had corkboard. Mister Nottasheep, sensing his opportunity, tacked his crappy sketch to the opposite wall. Instant teacher's pet.

Of course, in hindsight, what really made us sheep was standing there meekly letting that stupid fat fuck yell at us. And making our daddies pay big bucks for the privilege.

It doesn't get much better than this (unfortunately)

The rest of that first year dragged on in similar style, more or less painful depending on the level of bitterness and sadism of each particular teacher.

At least I got to do some life drawing, when no-one was looking. I got caught once trying too hard to make my drawing look like the model, and that teacher (whose name is a blank, too) rewarded me by handing over a hunk of fluorescent orange chalk the size of my fist (the kind of thing the Highway Department uses to mark underground gas lines on the pavement) and permitting me to draw with nothing else for the rest of the term.

To be fair, it's possible that he was trying to address what really was my biggest failing as a draughtsman — I badly needed to loosen up a little. But I wasn't going to loosen up struggling to draw naked people with a brick. Not that it mattered; I think this was the guy who made us draw the model while she dashed around the room.

Or am I confusing him with the typography instructor who taught us letterforms by projecting slides of typefaces on the nude bodies of women?

Second verse, same as the first

In the second year, we chose our majors. I started with illustration. I figured they couldn't possibly teach three years of illustration without touching on materials or draughtsmanship or technique just a little bit. As it happened, I didn't last long enough to find out.

One of the mandatory course requirements was Color Theory with this sour old fart whose claim to fame was that he was supposedly the last surviving pupil of Josef Albers (I must be remembering that wrong, since Albers taught all his life and had only died a couple of years before). Anyhow, he was like some holy relic — a saint's toe-bone, maybe — that the school administration was anxious to rub onto as many kids as possible before he was gathered to god.

If you have never heard of Josef Albers, it is possible that you may still live a long and fulfilling life and die peacefully in your own bed surrounded by a loving family. Albers was a German of the Bauhaus who emigrated to the US before WWII. He became well known as an educator, designer, photographer, typographer... oh, blah, blah, blah. Who cares?

What he's famous for is color theory, and a series of abstract paintings of brightly colored squares. Near as I ever figured it out, his theories have to do with the way colors appear different depending on which other colors they're put next to or on top of. It's not as simple as that — I know this because teacher said it was so — but that's as much as I ever got.

After a couple of weeks of unintelligible harangue, Professor Moonface showed us exercises by some of his best pupils of years past. These generally consisted of two small panels side by side: on one side, say, a blue rectangle with a small lavender square on it, on the other an orange rectangle with the same small lavender square on it. Behold! The lavender square looked blue against orange but purply against blue! Some of his pupils had been daring enough to use small lavender circles rather than squares, but we were warned, as beginners, not to get in over our heads.

Then we were sent to our rooms to try it for ourselves.

Though we were admonished not to be reckless and try more than one or two exercises on our first attempt, I stayed up late into the night posing little colored squares (and triangles and, yes, even circles!) against little colored rectangles.

Hm. It was actually pretty cool. With some color combinations, you could see dramatic shifts in apparent color. Maybe this was worthwhile information, after all.

Next day, I prop my two or three best exhibits up on the table with the rest of the students and take my seat. Teacher goes around squinting at each one in turn. He points to one of mine.

"Who did this?" he says.

"I did," I say modestly.

"Come up here," he says.

I go up there, rehearsing in my head what I'm going to say. "Really," I say in my head, "it wasn't anything special. I just kept trying different combinations until it looked right."

"This person," he says, waving his knobbly, crooked old-man finger at me, "is a plagiarist! A plagiarist!! She stole these ideas from persons better than herself!"

Agape. Thunderstruck. Gob-smacked. Honestly, to this day, I have no fucking idea what that means. They're tarted up construction paper squares, for chrissakes! What, did I steal somebody's color? I have to assume I actually did something. Or else why would he single me out?

Truly, I did not grok Josef Albers.

I walk straight from class to the admissions office and switch major to Painting.
 

This was handy since, as mentioned above, painting class was right after Color Theory in the Illustration program, so I already had my Rembrandt gear with me. I switch life paths in no time.

The studio I was sent to wasn't my usual. It was large, high-ceilinged, bitterly cold, full of skinnier, wormier-looking students than the illustration program. Everything stank of turpentine. A small space heater was trained on the model who, nevertheless, had nipples shrunk to the size of pennies. And not nice big, warm brown British pennies from the days of empire, either. Little mean, red, angry American ones. Poor thing.

I had been a painting major for all of fifteen minutes before a Teaching Assistant steals up behind me and says, "you're sculpting on canvas." Oh, shit.

"Pardon me?" I say.

"You're not painting. You're sculpting on canvas. You're trying to represent a three dimensional object in two dimensions."

"This is a bad thing?" I say, but my heart sinks. I know what he means. I've heard this song before. I'm trying to paint something that looks like what I'm looking at, and that's wrong and unpainterly. Never mind that accurately representing visual information has been the very definition of art for all but the last 70 of the 40,000 years or so of human history.

"I want you to make that arm orange and...mmmm...that leg green," he says.

"Sure thing," I say, but I ignore him. He's just a pond-skimming grad student, after all. If I can hold out until the Big Guy shows up, I might be able to...weasel something.

As it happens, I pull off an Olympian weasel. A weasel among weasels. A Weaselopolis. I tell the instructor that I'm a new painting major, but I'm allergic to turpentine(!), could I please stay at home and do watercolors? The curious thing is, the instructor not only went for it, he seemed actively pleased with my deviousness.

Now I have it made. I even work out a 'compromise' watercolor painting style that is satisfactory to both of us. By all accounts, the last two years of a painting major consists of solitary painting and critiques. This sounds like a little slice of heaven to a weary weasel.

So, when Summer rolls around, I drop out of school.

I was miserable. I was learning nothing. My dad was starting to grouse about the money. And, what was it buying, really? A piece of paper? You need a piece of paper to do astrophysics or shoe repair. You need a portfolio to paint pictures.

Teachers were explicitly forbidden to tell us anything practical. Nothing about stretching canvas or choosing paper, let alone things as mechanical and bourgeois as anatomy or paint chemistry. Facts inhibit creativity — creativity apparently being a fragile object like a hymen that you better not mess with because you only get the one.

We had to prove this creativity was intacta by rigid conformity to the house style. Differences of opinion were not allowed, under pain of savage ridicule. A couple of students in my original life class had started with an easy, graceful drawing skill I much envied, and ended two years later staring frozen at the paper for fear of making a mark the teacher would label — oh, the horror — "pretty".

 

We were unlearning, devolving, dulling our skills, derealizing our potential, sliding backward by the day. And, to top it off, we weren't having any damn fun. I swore to myself, if I ever caught me reminiscing about my good old college days, I'd throttle me.

As it turned out, I ended up with a corporate gig, where that piece of paper, however pointless to earn, would have been handy to have. But I'm glad I didn't try to stick it.

Another two years in that can of mixed nuts and I'd've barked like a doberman.