Yesterday, I had a donut-induced meltdown — from drawing them, not eating them. These were the directions for our in-class drawing exercises: Simplify the background, foreground, and subject to three values: dark, middle, and light. Use the white of the paper for the light value, a 2H pencil for the mid-tone, and a 6B pencil for the dark. Make marks or use line but don’t shade.
I went into high distress. I’ve been focusing on rendering by shading for months. My brain balked at the new way of seeing and mark-making, but I couldn’t fall back on what was comfortable. Was my head really going to burst? My teacher, Deepa, threw me a lifeline: Let the dark wrap all the way around the subject. She might have seen the steam coming out of my ears.
After the first exercise, I got up and walked around the room, appreciated what other students were doing, and referred to my sheet of sample marks from earlier in class. Then I sat down and tried again. Exercise two (above) went better.
Go ahead, break my brain.
Moments of not knowing how to do something new can get me so worked up. It goes way back to fearing others would ridicule or punish me for not having the favored answers. It’s also human. Our brains want to know things. But art practice provides a daily opportunity to shift those gears. In quieter moments, I welcome the exploding mind moments as opportunities: painful but priceless signals that my mind is on the verge of expansion and new understanding. In the big picture, this experience is more valuable than any donut-defining marks that may appear on my paper.
Finally, we pinned our exercises and homework to the classroom wall. Deepa pointed to my first drawing, “Here’s Shae having a conniption.” Then she pointed to the second, “And here’s Shae busting it out.” We laughed, and I think she was as relieved as I was by my mini-breakthrough. On my way home, I worked out some of my stress by eating one of my classmate’s models.
