Sometimes you do get back

"The Road Not Taken" By Robert Frost has always been an important poem for me. It speaks of the decisions we make every day and how those small decisions can determine the course of our lives. To me, the poem expresses the longing for what can not be once we have chosen a path. The lines don't suggest that you can never go back but the prospect is unlikely.

"And both that morning equally lay
In leaves no step had trodden black.
Oh, I marked the first for another day!
Yet knowing how way leads on to way
I doubted if I should ever come back"

When I was in high school the things that balanced my difficulty with math were music and art. At one point because I took the road less travelled and took German instead of the usual French which most of my classmates were taking, I was doing my grade 11 music in a grade 12 class and my grade 12 art in a grade 10 class. It's a good thing that both the art and music teachers were flexible and willing to bend the rules a bit for me. In grade 12 I even shared a studio with three other art students. In fact it was a storage room in the basement that was hot and had no natural light. The other students were much better at art than I was but I had my space there probably so I could go my own way without having to spend all of my art period with the grade 10's. :-)

I used to spend my Saturdays listening to the opera and CBC radio and painting, making prints or building model houses. Once my mother allowed me to fill the bathtub with water and float oil based inks on the water so that I could make interesting prints by laying paper on top of the swirling colours and then immediately lift them off. I cleaned up the mess in the bathtub but still, that was very forward-thinking of her.

When I graduated from high school it seemed natural to me to go into Art Education since art had been what I loved to do in high school. I enrolled in the required courses and also enrolled in a drawing course. I wasn't very good at drawing and I knew it so I wanted to take a drawing course in order to improve. As it turned out, that was a bad move. The people in the course could already draw very well and my memory of it is that we didn't receive a lot of instruction on how to draw; we just got told to draw. I remember in one case the instructor assigned us a three-hour drawing of a live model and then went home. Art in university wasn't a happy experience for me and I came out with a D in drawing and a C in the other art course I took. The irony of the situation was that I didn't need the drawing course in order to continue in the teaching route but because I had a D on my record I wasn't allowed to take any more art courses until I retook the course and improved the mark. I thought that was the end of art for me.

Still, there was something about it that attracted me. I ignored that attraction for many years until I was teaching junior high. My teaching partner and I found out that one of the ways to help the kids settle down was to ask them to draw. Two of the other teachers we were working with actually had some experience in teaching people how to draw and introduced me to an alphabet of shapes. I felt as if I was in way over my head so I decided to take a drawing course offered by the local college of art and design through their extension program. There were no grades and I was free to just learn.

In that course I discovered that, while my drawings were not nearly as good as many of the other students', there was no magic to drawing. It required practice and at that time I decided I wanted to spend my time in other ways. Drawing raise its head again for me when I became part of a creative journal project. I realized that I like to draw. It helps me focus and puts me into the zone in the same way that woodworking does. Again, other things intervened but I have always liked drawing materials, coloured pencils, fiber-tipped pens, conte and pencils. I have quite a collection waiting for 'someday.'

Recently, while I was waiting for my husband to finish in the dentist's, I dropped into an art store nearby. There was lots of time so I went through the books and bought several. The one which has really captured my imagination is drawing with your artist's brain: learn to draw what you see - not what you think you see by Carl Purcell. The title made a lot of sense to me because I've read a number of Freeman Patterson's books about photography including Photography and the Art of Seeing. Also, I've always believed that in teaching writing the key is to help students think like writers. Once they've accomplished that step the rest can be taught relatively easily.

The Purcell book is exactly what I need at this point. He breaks down various techniques in ways I haven't seen before and particularly the one which turned on a light bulb for me was to see shapes that you want to draw in terms of short line segments. You only have to concentrate on one line at a time. I'm starting to look at objects with that in mind and suddenly the task of drawing pleasing and recognizable objects seems possible. Now I have another tool to use when I practice and I'm ready to do that practicing. As Rob Cosman, my handtool coach, says about wood working, 'most wood workers use hand tools because they enjoy the process.' I will draw because I enjoy the process.

Sometimes in life you get the opportunity to go back to the 'two roads [that diverge] in a yellow wood,' and take the other one. I'm looking forward to my journey in visual arts and I'm grateful to be back at the fork in the road once again after more than thirty years.

The drawing at the top of this post is one from the Creative Journalling class. We took a photocopy of a photo, cut it in half and then copied the photo on the other side working with it upside down. The drawing above is one that I did over 30 years ago. It is probably a copy of something in a drawing book although, at this point, I don't remember what.