letter #39 That Time I Enrolled in Art School

We're all making our own sense of things: the drawing edition.

My dear friend

I have been making sense of drawing. Enrolling at art school was, as so much of my life has been, an impulsive action grounded in a lifetime of yearning. Drawing has always fascinated me. At school, I would look at the pages of work that friends created in art class and I would wonder at whatever mysterious force was at work that facilitated this. What was it they knew that I did not? What was it they understood that I did not?

Long story short: after seeing it in my insta stories for about a week, I swiped up on an instagram ad for the Adelaide Central School of Art, read through the page that reassured me prerequisites ‘none’, clicked through to the timetable and then, with three days to go before enrolments closed, pressed submit on my application. And that was me, enrolled in the certificate/diploma of visual art.

I’m only part time, mainly focused on the drawing subject. It has slowly been dawning on me that drawing is as fundamental to the success of my embroidery and printmaking projects as handwriting is to my writing projects. (Parking the discussion of the importance of handwriting to the creative practice of writing for now, remind me to come back to this in a later letter).

In the first lesson we drew a box. An appropriate place to start for a course with no prerequisites. But even as we drew the box it was quickly clear that I was the only person who had taken this prerequisites: none quite so literally. After lunch, we drew two boxes. Then a chair. The teacher demonstrated the ways in which a chair is a series of boxes. Intellectually, I could grasp this. My hand did not understand and I thought, ‘This has escalated quickly.’

In the second lesson I was forced to admit that I had not done my homework. Embarrassing. But in my defence I had spent the week getting my first solo visual arts show ready for opening. The ridiculousness of this situation—launching a solo exhibition despite not having fully grasped the fundamentals of drawing a box—did not escape my attention. My teacher kindly said, ‘Don’t let yourself get behind because it’s very hard to catch up. The class moves quite fast.’

The full truth of this became apparent in week three when we have moved on to life drawing. Um, what? Two weeks ago we were drawing a box and now we are drawing a human body? I have no time to check what anyone else is doing because I am too focused on trying to get something onto my page that might even resemble a human body.

At the end of each lesson we turn our drawings to face the centre of the room and then we walk around and look at each other’s work. This was fine when we were doing a box, and wasn’t even too bad when we were drawing the chair. But by now it is clear that I am objectively, consistently, and by some margin, the least talented person in the class.

I think this first life drawing experience didn’t freak me out too much because it was all so new that I didn’t have time to think. But the next time I was faced with a life drawing class things were very different. Out of respect for the naked person, the heaters are on, a split system and a radiator. I have my easel quite close to the radiator. My middle aged mix of hormones, my sense of mild panic, my memories of adolescence and of being in art class and not knowing what I’m doing, all combine to create the fiercest hot flush I have experienced since I don’t know when. I enter the feedback loop, where the hot flush ups my anxiety, my anxiety further fuels the flush, and so on and so on. Why am I doing this to myself? Because by now the census date has passed and if I withdraw I get no refund on my fees. And while I’m well aware of the fallacy of sunk costs, I’m also aware that I can’t give up just yet. I keep measuring distance and angles and making lines and when I get in the car after the class I let myself have a tiny, teeny little cry.

In the second-to-last week of term, we do not draw humans only objects, and we are learning tone and shading, and I love it. It is extraordinarily soothing and I seem to be able to convey the tone much more easily than I can the shape. If I had to choose just one thing to do for the rest of my life it would be shading.

When we share our homework at the end of this lesson, I am still horrified at how my work looks when compared to everyone else’s. At the same time, however I’m overcome by the most wonderful sensation.

I don’t care what any of them think either about my work or about me. Collectively, we see our work in the context of each other’s work. In this context, my work is objectively and consistently rubbish. But I can also see this drawing in the context of 54 years of being me. And in that context, that sphere with its shades of darkness and light is freaking outstanding. I genuinely don’t care what anyone else thinks. Feeling this—and believing it—has never, ever happened to me before and is extraordinarily liberating.

As I walk back to the car I am thinking two things simultaneously and with an equal amount of conviction: what the fk am I doing; this is the best thing I’ve ever done.

It isn’t easy, is it? This making sense of things.

In the final class of the term we have to bring in everything we’ve done. ‘I’m presenting my portfolio,’ I say to my family. Hahahaha. During the class—a full day of life drawing, sigh—we leave the classroom one by one. Out in the wide corridor our teacher photographs our work to remind her of things while she’s writing our assessments over the mid-semester break.

I am the last one to leave the class because I am so much further behind in my drawing than everyone else. As I open my sketchbook I say, ‘The last time I had my art assessed was in 1983 when I was in year ten.’ The teacher smiles because she has heard this from students before. But I add, ‘My teacher told me she hadn’t fired my pot because she wasn’t sure it was worth it.’

At the time, it didn’t really worry me that my teacher had said that. I knew I was no good at art, and I was just biding my time until I could drop it in year eleven. But my mother was furious and it was the only time she ever made an appointment to see one of my teachers. And what I did learn from this experience is that ‘it’s all material’ and I think it was the first incident in my life where I fully understood that a single incident can have its own narrative momentum.

Anyway, as I said this to my teacher at the end of my first term of drawing lessons, I started crying. What? Not in a sobbing kind of way, and not even in a way that the teacher would have noticed. But in that kind of ‘fark, life is a lot, isn’t it’ kind of way.

The teacher took the photos and made reassuring sounds. Obviously she didn’t say things like, ‘Tracy, if only you could see your work the way that others see it, your work is astonishing if only you had the confidence to see it.’ Nothing like that. More, ‘Look how much you’ve developed.’ And also, ‘Um, you haven’t quite finished your homework, will you get that done over the break do you think?’ But definitely no hint of, ‘None of this is worth it.’

Over the next couple of days I was a little bit, ‘Really? Am I really going to keep going with this?’ I mean life is short, and drawing a sphere no matter how beautifully it is shaded is neither wild nor precious.

But then I started cleaning out my cupboard where I keep all of my creative dreams. By which I mean where I keep boxes and boxes of unfinished projects and half-started projects and equipment to start projects and folders filled with scraps of paper that say ‘try this’. And in that cupboard, there is a lot of evidence that I have always wanted to learn to draw. All of the books (unsurprising). Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain, Drawing for Absolute Beginners and so on. A billion sketchbooks. In all the sizes and all the qualities of paper (also unsurprising). Pencils in every combination. Graphite, charcoal, the full range of H and B. I think I’m like the people who’ve never written anything but insist, ‘I’ve got a novel inside me.’ There’s something I want to say that my inner artist knows I can only say through a drawing. I’ve got a drawing inside me. No idea what that might be, although based on my life drawing efforts I feel confident in saying what it’s not. The drawing I’ve got inside me is definitely not: ‘gosh, look at this beautiful human form.’

My dear friend, I can hear your heart starting to beat faster with anxiety but please don’t worry! I’m not going to start sharing my drawings with you. Not through these irregular, infrequent, highly sporadic letters. Not through instagram. Not at all. I’ll keep them all in the context where they belong. My closed sketchbooks and from time to time, the recycling bin.

Apart from becoming a visual arts student, things in my life remain largely unchanged. I resolved (once again) to be a tidy person, the kind who would look in her wardrobe with the confidence of a woman who knows that she will find what she is looking for. Instead, I continue to sift through the debris strewn around my bedroom, throwing clothes from bed to chair to floor knowing that it must be in here somewhere. And as I cleaned out my cupboard and gathered together all of my unfinished projects and unrealised ideas and resolved (once again) no more new hobbies and no more new creative directions only to find myself, half an hour later, on the internet, trying to find the best formula for olive-oil-based lip balm. Sigh.

But I did also resolve to write to you, and that, at least, is done.

I will write again soon, or perhaps next year, and until then, I send you love.

Your friend

Tracy