Drinking that art school Kool-Aid

I told the basic story to some art school friends and we laughed because we're assholes.

Freshman year of art school was made up of foundation classes, three days of six hour long studio courses: 2D, 3D and drawing. (And of course those few liberal arts classes sprinkled in there that nobody cared about.) Your year was entirely made up by the quality of these classes, so if you had shitty teachers, you probably had a shitty time (or a great time but learned nothing). There were a few infamous teachers, the ones where you would need to put in the work and knew you were gonna end up pulling all nighters for, and those were the ones you wanted.

At least, I did, because I wanted my money’s worth.

My spring drawing teacher was one of the infamous¹ ones. Controversial, even, for his out of the box ways and focus on discovery and theory. He was the only drawing teacher to not have a section based on figure drawing (though I remember he once went on a diatribe against us and threatened to start pulling in models if that’s what we so desired), and was one of the ‘abstract’ artists who focused on the quality of line work, the texture of the paper, that every mark on the canvas was placed purposefully and for a reason- the intentionality behind every mark. Our final was him pulling artwork from his personal collection and assigning specific ones for each of us to stand up and critique in front of everybody (and our field trip was going to his home, a converted firehouse filled to the brim with his African art collection).

My school had a thing with one of the other schools in the area, meaning that we could crossover and take classes that weren’t offered at our own schools, schedule permitting. (Sophomore year I took two semesters of Japanese, hoping to meet non-art school dudes who weren’t pompous hipsters or gay and instead got a class full of weebs, but that was my mistake.) The offer stood for the other school as well. That spring, we had our first- and only, to my memory- crossover student. She already had our school’s brightly colored, brand new tote bag on her shoulder on our first day of class, which lasted for about 15 min, if not less.

“Bring me a drawing, or what you think is a drawing, by the next class,” was the only thing the teacher told us, and we were dismissed.

Next week rolled around, and we all arrived, pinning our pieces to the wall. The kind of work varied greatly- some of the people you can tell were trying to appease the qualities this teacher liked, and literally threw paint onto paper. Others, like me, went with whatever we were comfortable with (in my case, a portrait in charcoal). Non art school girl brought in a pencil shaded scene of her room mate in her dorm room’s lounge, carefully tugged free from from her spiral bound sketchbook.

We all stepped back from the wall.

The teacher then went and verbally destroyed all of them as empty- specifically calling out one of the more abstract ‘paint thrown against the wall’ pieces, “If this was you trying to suck up to me it didn’t work.”

We laughed at that guy- he laughed at himself even.

And then the teacher had his next assignment for us: “Okay, now I want everybody to take down their drawing, rip it in half and trade it with the person next to you. Tape your two halves together and draw on top of it.”

I was one of the people who was warned that this was going to happen with this specific teacher (one of the reasons he was infamous), so I was mentally prepared. But even for the ones who weren’t, nobody protested. We did what we were told; it was no big deal.

It wasn’t until the end of class when we realized that the non art school girl was no longer there.

“When did she leave?” One of us asked.

“Wait, she left?”

“I don’t think she wanted to rip up her drawing...”

We managed to piece together that after we all descended back onto the wall to claim our work and rip it up, she took hers, slid it back into her sketchbook and slipped out of the room.

We all felt bad and wondered briefly if it was a carefully calculated joke (you can’t choose your foundation teachers, you’re randomly assigned)- we had plenty of traditional drawing teachers where this girl would’ve found space in, with figure drawing and traditional studies of chiaroscuro and taking what you see in front of you and transferring it to the paper. Though, my last drawing teacher, while amazing and taught just that, also started off on a more conceptual way (our first day was literally blindfolding ourselves and feeling the paper as we drew lines), would she have done okay there? Or would she have also left early? Maybe she should’ve taken an illustration class over a foundation drawing course?

This is the only existing picture of one of the pieces I made for his class, and got a good critique out of it. Did I figure out that he loved super minute details in ultra large work and spent most of that week on the floor on my hands and knees using a pen to draw little details that can’t be seen and layering tracing paper to achieve different layers of opacity? Yes, yes I did. Was this just me essentially sucking up to what he likes? … I don’t know, maybe. Probably. I do acknowledge that the look of this is not super appealing to most people. But I do like to get really up close to art work now to look at everything and love slapping a texture onto everything I make…

Some of us talked a little shit about her because we were pretentious assholes with superiority complexes (this is why people hate us), like, hey, I guess this is why she ended up going to a university and not art school.

We never saw her again.

Sometimes I think about how frustrating I would’ve been had I had this teacher first, and how I was comfortable coming from more of an illustration point of view, because I’ve always wanted to be an animator and character designer. But by spring semester I had been broken down, mostly by bad time management, a dramatic social life and suddenly being an adult with no one to stop me from eating chicken fingers at 2 a.m. three times a week. The difficulty of my first semester and the adjustment to college had me not doing so well in the first part of my very traditional drawing class, so though this one was difficult in a vastly different way, I was far more prepared, mentally.

My mentality of, “well, this might as well happen,” probably comes from this time period.

I ended up coming away from that spring semester drawing class thinking I learned a lot- years down the line, I don’t remember what, though. Just a sense of vague but important lessons that supposedly live with me forever, about the impermanence of art, and that nothing was sacred and to not get super attached to things. But was that the overall message I got from going to art school or was that just attributed to this one class? I don’t remember, but this girl’s silent departure was something I would recall from time to time, and wondered, when I started skipping out on Japanese class at her school, if I was considered the weird art school kid who disappeared on them².

1. The reviews on ratemyprofessors.com on him are very polarizing.

2. In my defense, class was twice a week at 9:30 am, I lived over a mile away and didn’t have a bike, and I was taking the class pass/fail. I passed, bitches!