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zip, zip, zip, zip, zip
with the charcoal, all over, and I
figure it's hopeless--utterly hopeless.
I go back to cover up my drawing, which consists of a few lines crowded into the upper left-hand corner of the newsprint--I had, until then, only
been drawing on 8½ X 11 paper--but some others in the class are standing nearby: Oh, look at this one," one of them says. "Every line counts!" I
didn't know what that meant, exactly, but I felt encouraged enough to come to the next class. In the meantime, Jerry kept telling me that drawings that
are too full aren't any good. His job was to teach me not to worry about the others, so he'd tell me they weren't so hot.
I noticed that the teacher didn't tell people much (the only thing he told me was my picture was too small on the page). Instead, he tried to inspire
us to experiment with new approaches. I thought of how we teach physics: We have so many techniques--so many mathematical methods--that we
never stop telling the students how to do things. On the other hand, the drawing teacher is afraid to tell you anything. If your lines are very heavy, the
teacher can't say, "Your lines are too heavy," because
some
artist has figured out a way of making great pictures using heavy lines. The teacher
doesn't want to push you in some particular direction. So the drawing teacher has this problem of communicating how to draw by osmosis and not by
instruction, while the physics teacher has the problem of always teaching techniques, rather than the spirit, of how to go about solving physical
Problems.
They were always telling me to "loosen up," to become more relaxed about drawing. I figured that made no more sense than telling someone
who's just learning to drive to "loosen up" at the wheel. It isn't going to work. Only after you know how to do it carefully can you begin to loosen up.
So I resisted this perennial loosen-up stuff.
One exercise they had invented for loosening us up was to draw without looking at the paper. Don't take your eyes off the model; just look at her
and make the lines on the paper without looking at what you're doing.
One of the guys says, "I can't help it. I have to cheat. I bet everybody's cheating!"
"
I'm
not cheating!" I say.
"Aw, baloney!" they say.
I finish the exercise and they come over to look at what I had drawn. They found that, indeed, I was NOT cheating; at the very beginning my
pencil point had busted, and there was nothing hut impressions on the paper.
When I finally got my pencil to work, I tried it again. I found that my drawing had a kind of strength--a funny, semi-Picasso-like strength--which
appealed to me. The reason I felt good al)out that drawing was, I knew it was impossible to draw well that way, and therefore it didn't have to he
good--and that's really what the loosening up was all about. I had thought that "loosen up" meant "make sloppy drawings," but it really meant to relax
and riot worry about how the drawing is going to come out.
I made a lot of progress in the class, and I was feeling pretty good. Up until the last session, all the models we had were rather heavy and out of
shape; they were rather interesting to draw. But in the last class we had a model who was a nifty blonde, perfectly proportioned. It was then that I
discovered that I still didn't know how to draw: I couldn't make anything come out that looked anything
like
this beautiful girl! With the other models,
if you draw something a little too big or bit too small, it doesn 't make any difference because it's all out of shape anyway. But when you're trying to
draw something that's so well put together, you can't fool yourself: It's got to be just right!
During one of the breaks I overheard a guy who could
really
draw asking this model whether she posed privately. She said yes. "Good. But I
don't have a studio yet. I'll have to work that out first."
I figured I could learn a lot from this guy, and I'd never get another chance to draw this nifty model unless I did something. "Excuse me," I said
to him, "I have a room downstairs in my house that could be used as a studio."
They both agreed. I took a few of the guy's drawings to my friend Jerry, but he was aghast. "Those aren't so good," he said. He tried to explain
why, but I never really understood.
Until I began to learn to draw, I was never much interested in looking at art. I had very little appreciation for things artistic, and only very rarely,
such as once when I was in a museum in Japan. I saw a painting done on brown paper of bamboo, and what was beautiful about it to me was that it
was perfectly poised between being just some brush strokes and being bamboo--I could make it go back and forth.
The summer after the drawing class I was in Italy for a science conference and I thought I'd like to see the Sistine Chapel. I got there very early
in the morning, bought my ticket before anybody else, and
ran
up the stairs as soon as the place opened. I therefore had the unusual pleasure of
looking at the whole chapel for a moment, in silent awe, before anybody else came in.
Soon the tourists came, and there were crowds of people milling around, talking different languages, pointing at this and that. I'm walking around,
looking at the ceiling for a while. Then my eye came down a little bit and I saw some big, framed pictures, and I thought, "Gee! I never knew about
these!"
Unfortunately I'd left my guidebook at the hotel, but I thought to myself, "I know why these panels aren't famous; they aren't any good." But then
I looked at another one, and I said, "Wow! That's a
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