Stand back…
Back when I was first introduced to painting techniques as a teenager, I remember a few tips. Ms Norton, my middle school art teacher, was an amazing art instructor and one of my favorite teachers of all time. She thrived on seeing kids create, and provided us the inspiration, tools, and countless techniques. She was both patient and full of wisdom. I was once sketching an image from a photo I had in her class, and just couldn’t get the shape and form right. Ms. Norton suggested I turn my drawing and photo upside down and then keep going. “you’re wanting to draw the shape of a face that you know in your head, but just draw the shape you see instead”. It blew my mind, and sometimes today I turn a painting upside down to detach my brain from ‘what’s familiar’ and focus on what I see.
My lifetime art mentor, Charles Kennedy, taught me to “stand back”. I often practice this not just in paintings but in various aspects of life. Stand back for a minute, look at something else, and then take a fresh look. You’ll probably notice something new.
My art teacher in high school really sucked. Sure, she satisfied the core tenet of a teacher and cared, I guess. But she had it all wrong, especially as an art teacher. She would subtract letter grades from your artwork because she didn’t like some subjective component of your painting. Nothing compositional, technical, brushwork, value/contrast, form or any other academic aspect of art. Once she told me “ooooh I like your painting, but you should have a bird in the sky, or maybe a couple of them”. I replied that the way I remember this scene, there were no birds. She appeared visibly frustrated when I suggested this. The next day I turned in the final painting sans bird(s) and she insisted once again, that it would really look better with a bird in the sky. I ended up getting a B+ on the painting, and I know exactly why.
She was, as my mentor Chas. Kennedy noted, surely a “sensitive artist”. She’d spend our entire class in the back of the room listening to Coldplay and sketching her own lousy photos of her boyfriend singing into a microphone or some dumb shit. She worked the entire year on a weird sketch of a Mayan pyramid with an escalator and manakins on either side. It never made it passed this sketch-draft process on 32 x 32 inch manila posterboard before she started pasting magazine cutout pictures of faces on the poster. Instead of having students sit around and look at each others’ artwork (which we had actually started to do in secret) she’d always parade around her dumb fucking art and ask us why there wasn’t bird in our fucking paintings.
This post has certainly devolved and degenerated. But I sure do appreciate this opportunity to vent about my high school art teacher. In fact, this art teacher was a very dissapointing aspect of my young adult life. It happens. I was lucky to be in a school that afford art supplies. Many cannot. At any rate, this allowed me to “stand back…” for a minute, before I get back to work on this painting.