My Journey in the Visual Arts: Part 2 of 10

This is a series of short posts that will piece together how I ended up in the visual arts. I don’t recall an Ah-Ha situation where I knew from a particular moment that I wanted to be an artist. It just sort of crept up on me. It has now been over 35 years since I pursued art as, at first, a serious avocation then a profession. Along the way I have been very fortunate having experienced many facets of the visual art world. During that time I have also made attempts to leave that world only to be pulled back in somehow. You can read the first post in this series here.

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When we moved from the city I went to a middle school that had an actual art room. Only two projects stand out in my mind from that art class – a drawing and a clay project. Though I am not entirely sure, I am thinking that the drawing project had something to do with copying an ad from a magazine. What makes me think this is because of what I choose as well as another student’s drawing that made an impression on me, which is where I will start. I remembered a beautifully drawn picture, in pencil, of two faces that I believe were a mother and child. There was an elegance and maturity about the manner in which it was drawn but at the time, I only could conjure up the idea that the drawing was really lovely and very realistic. So I wanted my drawing to also be very realistic. I choose an image of a long elegant hand, it was probably an ad for hand cream or maybe nail polish, who knows! Anyway, I drew the long elegant hand, in pencil, complete with a shadow showing the finger tips resting on a surface. When I got the drawing back it was graded a ’10’ which was like an A+. (I am finding it heard to believe that I actually remembered that grading system). Anyway, I was very happy and when I was allowed to take the drawing home I taped it to my mirror. At some later point, I decided the drawing needed color so I polished the nails. I am now wondering if I used real nail polish to do that??

The other project was really only memorable for other reasons. We had to make a clay pinch pot and I remember I made this tiny pot with a crooked lid that I painted this sort of muddy rose color and put a blue stripe on it. It was pretty terrible. Now the reason I remember the project because there was a boy that I had a giant crush on that was in the class either before or after mine and I decided I would find his clay project and write a message on the bottom, which I did. It said “Hi Danny From Diane”. Not exactly poetry but there wasn’t much space!

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