I needed to build my confidence and feel like I could develop proficiency in drawing. I remembered a couple of years earlier, in Mr. Prinsen’s art class in high school, when I learned how some impressionist painters worked outside in everyday locations. Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec drew urban scenes inside Paris cafes and theatres, or at the racetrack, portraying everyday people in a humorous, almost caricatured style. After seeing his work, I thought I could certainly just sketch whatever I saw around me, instead of all the landscape and sunlight studies done by Monet. Maybe the images of people interacting in the moment felt more real to me. It was almost like a kind of social realism, taking a colour snapshot of the moment without using photography.
I started sketching every day, buying cheap felt pens and sketchbooks at Shoppers Drugs on Davie Street. When I drew, I worked quickly to scribble down whatever person or scene was in front of me, or struck my fancy. There were hundreds of little moments like those, captured in a dozen sketchbooks as I slowly learned how to draw.
I’d been waiting for months to get a reply from my application to the Emily Carr College of Art and Design. I’d obsessively recalled my portfolio interview in my mind a thousand times, rehashing each expression, facial tick, and covert glance from my two interviewers. It had been the most important day I’d had in almost forever.
Before my portfolio interview, I’d waited nervously in a small room with the other applicants, each of us holding our portfolio cases. I think I was even kind of clutching mine. I watched a short, authoritarian english-sounding man with silver hair and a thick beard stride into the room and speak to a staff member with an air of confidence. Maybe he was someone important, I decided. It made me curious but it did nothing to calm my fear and raw nerves.
Portfolio interviews were held across the hall in a quiet, carpeted room with two interviewers at each table. The mood felt calm, but I was anything but. At the table I was called to, the man on the left was named John. He looked thirty-ish and seemed bemused at my self-consciousness. I was nervous and worried that he was looking down on me or somehow seeing right through me. The man on the right was well into his sixties, bearded, and slightly stooped, with serious eyes behind thick eyeglasses. He introduced himself as Dennis. His manner felt open and sympathetic.
They flipped through my portfolio of sketches and drawings and asked me questions and commented on the dates and times that I’d compulsively written at the bottom, next to each little signature. John looked at a squiggly, scribbled portrait done in ballpoint pen. I signed and dated all my sketches in an almost documentary way. When John saw the time printed at the bottom, he said “2:35am?!?”. I sheepishly replied that inspiration came at odd hours, and thought “Oh god, what a cheesy response!” He just smirked, and flipped to the next page.
I was sure that there were some moments of “good enough” in my sketches but I wasn’t confident of my overall chances. I figured that I was a long-shot and not likely to get in. Every other student applying that day had to be a much better illustrator than me, and they were probably all smarter and more experienced in art. My chances were weak. I was a long-shot at best. A lifetime of feeling like the odds were stacked against me was bubbling up in my heart, and little claws of doubt and loathing were scratching up, trying to take hold. That afternoon, everything in my life seemed to hinge on passing that portfolio interview! It was a door I just had to get through if I was going to get on with my life and build something that was my own. It was nerve-wracking but I kept my cool and hoped for the best. I wanted it so badly!
Finally, one day, a letter arrived from the Emily Carr College of Art. I steadied myself as I opened it in the lobby of our apartment building. My heart was pumping. My application essay and nervous portfolio interview flashed through my head like they had every week since. It had felt like an eternity of waiting for my chance: waiting to see if I was good enough to get in, and waiting to find out what art school was really like. I wondered what I would do if I ended up reading a polite letter of rejection. I really wanted to get in.
My eyes locked on the words “we are pleased to offer you acceptance into the fall term”. I couldn’t believe it! It was like winning the lottery or being handed the keys to a new life. It’s difficult to describe the breathless mix of elation, excitement, anticipation that I felt reading that line!
The fear of the unknown, the doubt and worry started to kick in right away. Sure, I had gotten a foot in the door, but could I go through with the rest of it? What was this school going to be like? Would I make it through? Maybe passing the interview had just been a fluke…
I had no idea of what to expect nor what post-secondary life would really be like. I tried to imagine myself being a real art school student, mentally inserting my face into the pictures of smiling students in the Emily Carr College promotional catalog. It felt like I was given a new start, a new path. I was pursuing my vague goal of learning about art and design, and I wondered exactly what I had gotten myself into.
Even though I’d now been accepted, I still felt like I needed to pass some extra audition to satisfy my own sense of proficiency. I decided that the answer was to do a life drawing session. I told myself that it was something that real art students did.
I told my Dad about it and he got really angry and said “What do you need to draw a naked woman for?” I tried to explain that it was just a study of the female form, anatomy, light, and such, but he was really furious about it, as if I was shooting a porno. He sniped “Why can’t you just draw fruit?” In my head, I cracked up and decided he just didn’t get me at all and he and his 19th century conservatism could go fuck off. I’d go ahead do what I wanted to do anyway, and I did.
I went to a life drawing session in a small artists studio down on Granville Island. I’d never drawn a live nude model before, but I knew it was an experience that I’d have in art school and I wanted to get a head start. It was a weird “do the homework before it gets assigned to you” kind of insecure thinking.
I don’t think I’d ever actually been so close to a naked woman before. The model was young and pretty, and not puffy or flabby like the Renaissance-era nudes that I’d seen in art books. This young lady was slim and a little plain, natural and not glamorous. I took a serious mental approach to the experience, regarding her objectively like I was an anthropologist or something. It was important – a lesson – and a chance to learn snippets of anatomy and modeling in real-time.
The concentration in the room was intense – at least on my part. I tried to see if I could make my pencils render something accurate on the page. The whole room was still except for the scratching sounds of a dozen pencils and graphite sticks on newsprint. It felt austere and serious, almost like a prayer, but also stressful like a timed exam or a choir recital.
It was amazing to realize how difficult drawing from life actually was. How hard should I push the pencil? How hard or soft should the mark be? Why weren’t my lines strong enough (wrong kind of pencil for newsprint). Should I rush and work fast? How much time should I spend?
My proportions sucked. With every line and mark, I could see my fears and flaws coming out on the paper. My troubled attempts made it obvious that I lacked control over the signals between my eyes, brain, and hand. It was my expectation of an elegant swan dive which had been exposed to be a slow-motion belly flop into a pool full of jello. Splat! I knew that I just kind of sucked.
After the drawing session was over, my eyes and brain were exhausted. I felt like I’d been through a small, painful rite of passage. All my drawings were likely pure shit, but I consoled myself that I was still learning and had made an honest attempt at what turned out to be a very difficult exercise.
The model wrapped herself in a silk robe and gathered her clothes, and as she passed me to get changed in a small adjoining room, she shot me a little smile. She’d seemed to be able to tell that I was nervous and self-conscious.
I was definitely unsure of my drawing skills, but still quite pleased with having completed an arduous drawing exercise. It was the first of what would become an ongoing argument between my eyes, brain, and hands, and one of the most difficult drawing tasks I took on. Over the next four years of art school, I kept signing up for life drawing classes.
