Last Thursday

Last Thursday evening as soon as my husband got back home from work, with a quick kiss and instructions about dinner, I left the house to rush to the Life Drawing class. After hurrying from place to place all day I was struggling to relax and there is nothing else that can ruin a drawing session as well as feeling stressed. With every quick sketch made I was getting more and more tentative instead of loosening up. Everyone around me seemed to be doing a lot of impressive shading – it is so much easier to notice good things about other’s work, while being super-critical of one’s own.

And then, during the break, the teacher commented on the expressiveness of my lines, which brought me back to my senses. I can do lines. Lines are easy. He also encouraged everyone to have fun and not stress about the end results. So I got out a charcoal pencil and let myself draw outlines with the bold lines. As I was starting to attempt to do some shading, the teacher was back and pointed out that mixing line and shading may result in very disjointed looking drawing, he encouraged me to continue working with lines to show the form. “It could be harder at first, but the result will be worth it” or something to that effect. Harder? Finally having fun, I wasn’t thinking about difficulty of various approaches. The advice of my old art teacher on varying the thickness of the line came back and so I kept on drawing lines. Even in the last drawings the proportions were all wrong, but I was happy with the results and the progress made from the tentative drawings to the bolder lines in the three hours.

At the end of the class we turned our sketches to face the middle of the room and looked at them – every one of them was unique and executed in differently. While walking home I contemplated how I stumbled on another piece to the puzzle of discovering my own style, amazed that I never connected my admiration for Lines in other’s artwork and my own work (you should’ve heard my raves about lines in Egon Schiele’s work after I discovering it in Vienna).

I used to love Life Drawing classes, enrolled into this one with the desire to have fun and I did. I left home feeling exhausted and stressed, I returned happy and full of energy.