Taking It Seriously In the Heat

Early morning on the side porch, and the tender violet sky of last night has awakened into pale blue and wispy clouds  float in out of the viewfinder that is the porch door.   The sprinkler is already twirling on the front lawn and the rich smell of wet grass and soil floats through the 12-foot high mountain laurel that screens us from the street. The variegated coleus  have grown a foot since I was last home and  the little dogwood tree in front of the garage now  completely blocks our  neighbor's  view of the porch. 

 

 

 

 

It is good to be home.

 

 

 

It is even good to have Brewster wake me up at 6:00 a.m. and watch him drink two bowls of water. The day is sultry hot again, but we all had a good night's sleep after Mr. Pom dragged the air conditioners up two flight of stairs and popped them in the windows. His timing was perfect as we arrived home hot and sweaty late last night after walking from the High Line to  Soho to catch a half hour visit with Micalangela. She was working, herding a group of pre-college students from her school on a NYC trip. We caught up with her at Strand, walked down to Uniqlo, bought her a few pairs of shorts, and then into Dean and Deluca where she got sushi take out for the bus ride home.

 

 

 

It was the last thing I expected to be doing on Saturday, when I was supposed to be driving home from the Cape. The trip was cut short for a day for various reasons out of my control, but it was wonderful to be having coffee with Mr. Pom on Saturday morning and then catching the youngest for a little while. The fast walk cross town was challenging in the heat but The High Line was delightful and I enjoyed an iced Americano from Blue Bottle Coffee.

 

 

 

It's always best to leave the Cape on a hot, sunny day. The pain of ripping yourself out of the simplicity of hammock, sand, water, read and  repeat,  is easier  when you can carry a bit of Cape light on your shoulders  instead of thunder and rain. It is also best to immediately plunge yourself into hot, sticky, touristy New York as the yin and the yang of it make up for missing  the gulls swooping over while we eat Liam's onion rings on the beach.

 

 

 

Last week's vacation started out as a  little swag bag that dropped unexpectedly into my lap, sweetened  with a friend's visit and the last minute decision to take a week-long drawing class together. Beware of weeks bearing gifts, however.  I will never take a week-long art class on a vacation week again, but I learned much more than the sum of the classes. I learned that its best to leave schedule and homework behind on a vacation and that challenging yourself in art never, ever ends as there is always so much more to learn.

 

 

 

The class was at a  funky little art center filled with wonderfully creative types who were busy in other studios making pottery and figure painting. There was a little lighthouse and a garden filled with lettuces as sweet and green as Farmer MacGregor's.  We had a pot luck lunch with veggie burgers and "meat" dogs and I got to talk with the sweet, young interns who made me intensely miss my youngest. 

 

 

 

The instructor was wonderfully generous with her collection of natural objects. She set up a  long table laden with  exotic and commonplace bits and bobs  of nature finds from seashells to gnarly roots  to fossilized rocks, dehydrated turnips, antlers, pine cones, magnolia pods,  a purple cabbage and a green fennel.  Our first assignment was to chose something off the table and and draw it,  and the only guidelines were to not draw in graphite and to not outline the shape, but  to express the volume of the piece from within.

 

DON'T GET EXCITED - ONLY THE EGGPLANT IS MY IMAGE. THE REST ARE FROM THE TALENTED STUDENTS IN THE CLASS

 

Somehow, I grasped that concept without too much fuss - the first and last concept I grasped for the rest of the class. I draw a lot. But I don't draw big. Which obviously is my Achilles heel.  Attempting a very large sketch with soft charcoal for the first time, I concentrated so hard on shading the volume that I completely forgot to go back in  and make finer lines to represent more detail. Oh. (My stalks were shaded very three dimensionally, so there was that at least.)

 

THE ONE THAT LOOKS LIKE A TURGID HEART WITH ARTERIES STIFF WITH PLAQUE IS MY FENNEL. 

 

On the first sunny day of the vacation, she gave us homework!  We  had to make five 9 X 12 drawings. So instead of going to the beach or the bookstore or the coffee shop, two very cranky artists  sat at the kitchen (the Art Garage was too dark and the patio too bright and hot) and muttered about damn charcoal and argued about whether using watercolor and painting it instead of drawing was cheating.

 

It is the last time I will dedicate a  whole Cape Cod afternoon and evening to homework of any kind.

 

 

 

After screwing up A COLLAGE the next day (a collage, mind you, my mixed media friends!) , I lost the ability to create anything that I didn't tear up for the rest of the week.  

This happens to me ALL THE TIME: when I take a class,  I forget everything I know and act like I've never held a pencil, brush, or pen in my life. You see, I work VERY slowly. I need to get up and walk around A LOT. I need to THINK about what I am drawing. I cannot be RUSHED.

 

And so, I whine. 

 

 

 

 

 

 I dripped sweat onto my charcoal sketch, mentioned ten times to the instructor that I'd NEVER USED SOFT CHARCOAL ON A 18 X 24 DRAWING BEFORE, and was USED TO WATERCOLOR WHERE THE LIGHTS GO IN BEFORE THE DARKS AND NOT VICE VERSA,  and started to wear a hole in the paper trying to create a highlight by erasing a sharp line into the charcoal.

The instructor casually mentioned as she walked by that I was having trouble and would never be able to do that BECAUSE THE PAPER SHE GAVE US was printmaking paper and did not have enough tooth for charcoal.

Did I mention that she forgot to put the correct paper on the supply list and handed me this paper to use?

 

 

 

And then it got freaking hot. 

 

I took a break and stood puppy-like at the entrance to the pottery studio, my tongue hanging out with desire to just pound clay.

 

But the best was yet to come: mark making in the dunes!

 

 

The instructor was a lovely woman who had a long professional career and taught drawing at the college level. Her critiques were extremely positive and encouraging for everyone.  At one point, after telling us we should stay and work as long as possible each day (wut? the sun is out after 3 days and we want to go to the beach),  that her drawing classes are at least 8 hours long (gotta be more empathetic to art students everywhere) , and that she never, ever teaches any drawing techniques in any of her classes (gotta get one of these teaching  gigs)  I realized that art school is actually very much akin to law school: figure it out yourself or flunk out trying. 

 

I obviously lack the Dedicated to Art gene because while I was whining about drawing and the youngest was text-laughing at me, our instructor was home CUTTING AND SAWING WOOD into a variety of rakes for us to use in order to create mandalas and tiles and mazes in the dunes of Truro that we were to climb in the middle of the hottest week of the year. 

 

 

Yeah.  Let the anxiety begin!

 

 

 

After being seriously pissed off about missing the 4th of July parade to attend class and fretting about carrying heavy  tools and sketchpads up and across the dunes in the middle of the day, the making-marks-in-the-dunes experience turned out to be the  highlight of the week.

 

 

 

I wisely chose not to climb the highest mountain, but go up a baby one and sit in a protected bowl inside a dune that was positioned to catch the breeze and afford me a view north to Pilgrim Lake and Provincetown Bay and south to the Atlantic.

Before I began making marks, I saw to get a sense of the swale and what it wanted to tell me. I listened to a hawk up above and followed its shadow across the scrub roses. I watched as the tracks of animals from the night before slowly revealed themselves to me as my eyes adjusted to the bright glare. I felt the breeze cool me off and marveled at listening to nothing more than silence.

I remembered why I come to the Cape in the first place. 

 

 

 

 

 

The stress of the responsibilities of the week drained away.  I could have sat in the dune for hours and just gaze at the horizon. The mark making was just like messing in the sand when you were a kid, and after I did my obligatory assignment, I decided just to sit and enjoy the amazing view and the solitary quiet. I felt not unlike Carlos Castaneda finding his power spirit but sans the 'shrooms.  

 

I took some great photos of my "marks" and the teacher picked out a particularly close up one for me to draw as large as I could - even suggesting that I put several pieces of paper on the wall if necessary - in order to blow up the scale.

 

 

I started a big piece in charcoal.

 

Gave up.

 

Turned it over, pinned it on the wall and started it in pastel. 

 

Gave up. 

 

Took out watercolors, drawing pencils, and Inktense pencils and ended up with a picture that looked like the roots of flood-swollen trees.  

 

Internets, I didn't have a clue.

 

 

 

However, I did discover that using drawing pencils on vellum to draw sea shells creates yummy creamy lines and the shine of the vellum is perfect to depict the polishing by the ocean.  I loved our beach walks and scavenging for oddly twisted pods and roots and lugging home a big ol' twisted trunk to draw. I enjoyed getting to know the other two women in our class. And I liked seeing the pieces my instructor had in a small show with four other women. She sculpted wood into organic forms, sanded them down to a satin finish and painted them with contemporary strips of color.

 

 

 

I will, however, be so much more organized and prepared when I teach my own classes. I will try to be as generous as our teacher was with her finds and hope I can teach y'all how to do the few fiddly and piddly techniques I know how to do with a paint brush or a pencil.

 

And I will always, always allow my students to  cut class to sit along Main Street and wave your little flag as the lobster float and the world's oldest jazz band march past in a Fourth of July parade.