Learning to Draw

It’s Monday, which means a newsletter (I have not committed to writing them weekly, but three times, as they say, is a trend), and also my art class this evening.

As a kid I was not “good at art”. I got the wrong message early on, when in a competition to draw a Christmas tree at primary school, instead of drawing a bright green tree covered with baubles and gifts like everyone else, I drew a tree growing in the forest covered in snow and robins. I won, and from then on decided that bright colours were babyish and everything should have sombre, muted tones. I didn’t understand why the teachers’ admiration for my work did not persist, and lost my confidence.

It was a similar story to my relationship with netball (which you can read about here, though alas without paragraph breaks which appear to have been lost in the importation process.) And just like netball, it turned out that when I tried it again as an adult, things were very different.

Do you also think you “can’t draw”? When was the last time you really tried? Was it perhaps as an uncoordinated child, looking at the work of the kid next to you which actually resembled what it was supposed to, and watching them being lavished with praise by the art teacher while you were handed some paper and pencils and left to get on with it?

This was my experience until last Easter when I went to Rome for the first time. I won’t attempt to describe here the wonders of Rome except to say that you can’t so much as turn your head without being confronted with an example of miraculous art or architecture. We spent an entire day being guided through the Vatican and barely scratched the surface of the treasures there. (As the old joke goes, if this is poverty, I can’t wait to see chastity.) And I was so overwhelmed by the beauty of it all that I wanted to have a go. Obviously I never dreamed (and still do not dream) that I would reach the skill of the artists whose work I saw, but I wanted to have some idea what it was like to create art, what was the process that they went through to make these things. To go back to the netball comparison, I didn’t want to make the team, I just wanted to be allowed to practice.

So I joined an art class, beginners level one, at the City Lit in central London. For our first lesson, all we did was make marks on the page. No attempt to represent anything.

After a couple of classes, we were taught about drawing light and shade to represent a curve, and were let loose on some pots. I was amazed that my pots looked like pots. This is because I am now an adult so my pencil goes more or less where I tell it to, and because the principles of art can be taught. This was true of everyone in the class, not just me.

I got more and more excited as, with guidance, the things that I drew looked like things, and I was taught different techniques so I started being able to make decisions about style.

By the end of a few months, I was drawing still lives, in colour.

I started drawing pictures of my pets, at home. I even bought myself an easel!

And as of a couple of weeks ago, I graduated to humans, when I joined my first ever life drawing class. Humans are difficult. As ever, the teacher’s advice helped loads.

I share these drawings, not only because I am proud of them, which I am, but to say, YOU CAN TOO. You can do the thing that you thought you were rubbish at as a kid and still think you are rubbish at now. You can draw, you can play netball, you can write poems, you can take photos. You can probably do it better than you think you can, especially if you are comparing yourself to you age 8, but actually it doesn’t matter, because that is not the point. The point is to enjoy yourself, to be proud of yourself, maybe to improve, to discover that that creaky old brain of yours can still learn something new. I don’t think I would have had the guts to join an art class if I hadn’t learned to speak Dutch when living in Amsterdam. That was my first attempt in forever to make myself do something completely new, and it was really, really hard, but after a year I could have fluent conversations with people in a language in which previously I would need to take photographs of street signs because the weird combinations of vowels would fall out of my head between looking up at them and looking down at my maps app.

YOU CAN DO IT. And it is fun! And it makes you feel fresh and alive and like a person who is still growing, who still has potential, someone you don’t know everything about yet. If you want to feel excited about life and about yourself, take a class.