Hal's keysI haven't drawn in such a realistic manner since I was in art school. Doing this drawing brought back a memory - my drawing teacher gave us a homework assignment to do the best drawing we could possibly do during the week before the next class. I drew a shelf in my pantry, with pots and pans and groceries. I remember it was big, maybe 18"x24", and I spent many, many hours on it, rendering everything as realistically as possible, with very black blacks, like the keys above. When we had class again, and everybody showed and talked about our drawings, the teacher told us the next assignment: TO ERASE THE DRAWING WE'D JUST DONE, AND DO ANOTHER DRAWING ON THE SAME PAPER! I loved it! She was teaching us two things: (1) not to be to attached to our work, because it isn't as precious as we'd like to believe, and (2) how to deal with the shadow of the old drawing (and any rips that resulted from erasing) when we drew the new one. Only one student in my class refused to erase her drawing, because she was too attached to it, and thought it really was her best work. She just didn't get it. Maybe I should erase today's drawing, and tomorrow's on the same paper!
Hmm. A tough one - given your Memory and associations, it might be an intriguing idea, but I also think that teacher was kind of brutal - I might not have Refused, as a young student, but I might have faked it! I might well have decided the lesson was to Never do my best for this teacher because he/she was devious and not to be trusted! SO. I'm hard to "teach"!
ReplyDeleteI do remember being told "do a hundred drawings and throw the first hundred away"... meaning it takes practice, practice, practice.
I guess I have to retain the right to care about my efforts or I just wouldn't Make them in the first place; I've read people don't really lift or use muscles as hard as they actually can because receptors in the muscles warn them off... but on PCP they can tear muscles and tendons because they don't get the warnings, but they do perform extreme feats between the prior "stop point" and the tear point. Maybe I just have too low a "stop point" and Need the permission to care enough to force my stop point higher...
Cool story though - very thought provoking... So, your teacher Did provoke reaction, even years later!
I told this same story to Alex, and he was adamant that he would Refuse to erase his drawing -- that if he wrote a good song (he's a musician,) and he would forget it if it wasn't written down, then HELL NO he wouldn't throw that piece of paper away! I think I won't erase this drawing. The lesson served its purpose 35 years ago...
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