Chapter 18: School Days

I checked my class schedule and saw that two of my classes in the Art building were back-to-back on Tuesday through Thursday. Both were lectures in the same room at ten and eleven. Then I had to truck halfway across campus for my Literature and the Arts course. My last class of the day wasn’t until three o’clock and was the only ‘art’ class I had. At least what I considered art. That was my Drawing Concepts and Methods class. My last class was the Colloquium in Art and it met irregularly, based on when lecturers were coming in. We were told at registration not to miss the first session next Tuesday at five in the afternoon.

By the time I got to my drawing class, I was pretty discouraged. I wasn’t going to be painting and making much art this term. In fact, I was going to be reading and writing papers. 2D Design would have a few studio projects, but according to the syllabus, the first four weeks were focused on a survey of 2D art and color theory. Foundations of Contemporary Art was a lecture on principles and ideas in the various movements of the past century. I guess we were supposed to fit into one of them or something. And the Western Culture course, Literature and the Arts, was going to start with Akhenaten’s Egypt. Professor Merck was pretty cool, though. Just from his attitude and posture, you could tell he toked up before the lecture and really didn’t want to be there.

“You’ve got a fabulously expensive text book that you picked up at the bookstore,” he said, “so it would be criminal if I didn’t make you read it. The ancient Egypt chapter is first. Your task in reading the chapter is to identify the heresy of Akhenaten and how it affected the development of the arts in Egypt of 1350 BC and changed its direction for centuries to come. This is going to take you some time to figure out, so why don’t we cancel class for tomorrow and come prepared to discuss the subject on Tuesday next week. Class dismissed.”

I wondered if he was always going to have short classes and cancel them. I checked his website and syllabus and the cancelled session was posted there with a more complete description of what he wanted us to cover in our reading. It looked like he actually expected us to get something out of it, so I figured I’d put some effort into my prep. Heck, I had almost a week to read and figure out what he wanted.

It was finally time for the class that I wanted—Drawing. I had my supplies and wondered what we’d be drawing first. This was the only class I had in a studio. Professor Blankenship, however, was not what I expected. I’d met three professors in the Art Department during my interview and thought they were all okay. Blankenship was a bastard.

“Children, sit down and shut up,” he started at exactly three o’clock. “For some reason, you all think you can draw. Did any of you even bring a pencil? Paper? What do you need? Finger paints? Get something in front of yourself that you can draw on and get ready. This is your subject.” He pointed to a plain black vase. “You have fifteen minutes and then I’ll look at your doodles and tell you if there’s any hope for you as an artist. The rest of you can switch over to computer graphics. Time starts now.”

Shit! I wasn’t expecting my one art class to be the worst on my schedule. What an asshole! I heard a sniffle and glanced to my right. A girl with dirty blonde hair and a baggy sweater was sitting with her art pad in front of her and tears running down her cheeks. Her hands were shaking so much I was sure she couldn’t get a shape drawn on the paper. She looked up at me just as I glanced at her. Her scowl seemed to melt a little, though, when I just nodded and mouthed out the words, “You can do it.” She nodded back and bent to her drawing.

That left me to mine. Dr. Anders had said they were going to teach me to slow down when I interviewed and here this jerk was giving us fifteen minutes to produce a drawing that our art careers were going to be based on. A drawing of a black vase. We could just scribble it with a crayon.

I looked at the vase and plotted out the major points of the shape. As soon as my graphite touched the pad, my soul lifted and I was drawing. Fifteen minutes? Fuck him. I’m not going to rush through a drawing just to satisfy his stopwatch. The more I looked at the vase, the more I saw. It wasn’t a flat black shape. It was shiny and reflected light. Of course, that was what would give it shape and turn it into a three-dimensional object. But there was more there and the deeper I sank into my drawing space, the more I saw. I could see the front edge of the pedestal it was sitting on reflected in the downward slope of the vase. In the midst of the highlight, I could see the girl who’d been crying reflected in a distorted way. I could see Professor Blankenship elongated and reflected on the other side. Suddenly the exact shape and contours of the vase no longer mattered. The vase was a canvas of reflections. I was lost in what I was seeing.

The bastard blew a whistle!

“Fuck!” I know mine was one of the voices that responded, but not the only one by a longshot. He started moving around the room immediately. There were eighteen of us in the class. As usual in Art, only four of us were male. It had been that way all the way through high school as well. Art is for sissies and no one wants to be a sissy. I didn’t care.

“You need to work on perspective,” Blankenship said, pointing at one piece of art. He moved to the next. “There’s no depth.” At another, “You should be a cartoonist, that’s the only direction your art is taking you.” “What the hell is that?” It seems like he didn’t have a good word to say about anyone. He stopped behind me and just stood there for a minute. My drawing wasn’t complete—not even close. In fact, there was only a hint of the outline. Instead, I’d focused on what I saw reflected. He cleared his throat. “Next time try drawing the vase,” he said and moved on to the girl who’d cried. I could see her hands were still shaking. I wondered if it was just her nerves or if it was some condition she had.

Blankenship surprised her and me, too, when he reached out and touched her hand. It seemed to steady a little. “I’ll show you how,” he said softly. Then he went to the front of the room and turned to stare us down again. As far as I could tell he hadn’t really said anything positive about anyone’s drawing.

“So, what makes you think you’re an artist?” he demanded. “Put your hands down. That was a rhetorical question. Look up the meaning. You undoubtedly all have mothers who still have your kindergarten scribbles tacked to the refrigerator. You’ve been told your drawings were good since the first time you stuck a crayon in an electrical outlet. Oh, you’re so talented, you should become an artist. Let me tell you exactly what all that means. Shit! You couldn’t run fast or play baseball or weren’t big enough for football, so you should be an artist. You weren’t pretty enough or couldn’t cook or were a failure at math and music, so you should be an artist. Art is where you got shoved because you weren’t good enough to do anything else. All the praise you got from your grandma, the awards you got at the 4-H Fair, the pictures on the refrigerator—none of that means shit. Accidentally drawing something that could be construed as looking like this simple black vase doesn’t mean you are talented.”

Blankenship was on a roll. I could see that every student in the class hated him already. He lectured and expected us to listen. Mostly he told us why none of what we knew or had accomplished meant anything.

“Limit your vision! Look at this vase. Find one thing about the vase and draw that. Not the whole vase. No! I’m not going to give you an example. Figure it out. Ten minutes. Certainly, there must be one thing about this simple black vase that you can draw in ten minutes. Ready, set, go.”

Fuck! We were drawing again. I looked at the vase and turned to a fresh sheet of paper. There was an indentation near the bottom of the vase and then it flared out flat from there to the table. I started with that, but quickly realized that what I was looking at was the vase reflected in the table’s surface. Reflection reverses the perspective. What was convex becomes concave. I found myself sinking into the drawing again.

Thankfully, the class ended before Blankenship blew his whistle. He had a big clock in front of the room and we looked up to discover it was five o’clock and he’d already left. Without saying anything to any of us. We all kind of looked at each other and then started packing up our materials. The blonde was gone before I could speak to her, so I just headed out to go home.

“So, you survived Blankety’s first day,” Eva said when she spotted me in the hall.

“Were you waiting for me?” I asked.

“Yeah. I wanted to check in and see if you survived. I was going to try to talk to you after orientation yesterday, but I had a tour that simply would not end. Our group was the last one back. So, how did it go?”

“Mostly okay, I guess. This class isn’t what I expected, that’s for sure. Does it get better from here?”

“No. It gets worse. Blankety never says anything positive about anything. I sometimes wonder how anyone can be so fucking negative about everything. You will never meet a student who likes him.”