By the eleventh grade, art classes had become my favourite. They were my safe place, and where I felt the most at home. I’d begun to believe that art could be a source of personal strength.

Killarney Secondary had two talented art teachers: Mr. Prinsen (whose room was also my home room), and Mr. Midtal, the ceramics and commercial drawing instructor, whose room was right next door. These rooms were located on the third floor, above everything else in school and, I was pleased to discover, noticeably quieter than anywhere else.

Maybe it was just dumb luck, but my homeroom had always been the art room. Every day since grade 8 (when we were known as “Division 8H”), my home room, the art classroom, had been located up above everything on the third floor of the school. It felt like a refuge from the chaos and commotion of high school life – a place to escape to when everywhere else got too loud or crazy.

Some art class drawing exercises remain favourite social memories:

Still Life in Pastels

A time I remember fondly was an hour spent sketching a still-life as part of a drawing assignment. The teacher had draped some fabric on his back counter and filled it with plants, vases, and an old Singer sewing machine.

We were instructed to find a scene within the setting and focus on the composition and details of shape, colour, and texture. I found the antique sewing machine to be the central object, and was fascinated by the folds of fabric around it, and the shadows and textures of the potted ferns and other plants.

The smell of graphite, and the oily feeling and silent pliability of my oil pastels was all I needed to feel happy and at peace, while I submerged myself unsupervised to explore the quiet world in that little corner.

Matching Self-Portraits

Goren and Zoren were twin brothers, identical in appearance but not in temperament. For a portraiture exercise in art class, we were each supposed to draw the person sitting across from us. While I drew the girl sitting across from me, Goren sat to my right, staring across the table at his twin brother.

Almost indistinguishable in appearance, the twins fascinated me, and I scrutinized their looks, voices, and personalities to find minute differences. I quickly found that the twins were as different in personality as they could be. Cynical and competitive, Zoren liked to remind his brother that he was a minute older than him, and teased him with little put-downs whenever he could. Goren was quieter and kinder, and tolerated being the butt of his brother’s jokes. They seemed to hang out in separate groups.

Mr. Prinsen always got them confused, getting mad at Zoren for being a smart-ass in class, but calling him by his brother’s name, which probably frustrated Goren to no end. However by senior year, Goren had worked out with weights and built up an impressive muscular physique. This helped him to increase his confidence and stand apart from his brother. Not coincidentally, it also seemed to reduce the ribbing he received.

Both brothers were good artists, and during our portrait exercise, our whole table tittered with the hilarious irony that maybe the teacher wouldn’t be able to tell the drawings apart. Zoren loved the attention he was getting, and leaned across the table to tell his twin brother “You’re ugly”.

Etching “The Hangout”

One of my favourite lessons from Mr. Prinsen was to work from what I knew and explore and develop from my own lived experience in some way. I wasn’t ready or able to represent any of the real, significant truths about my parents or my personal life, but I could pay some tribute to my friends in my neighbourhood in Park Place.

During my high school years, my neighbourhood friends were my real social glue, and hanging out with them helped me feel accepted and grounded. So, as part of an exercise in learning about etching (“intaglio” as I learned it was called), I decided to try and draw a scene from my neighbourhood life: me and my friends in the back alley of our townhouse complex, doing nothing but smoking and hanging out.

Later in the year, I developed “The Hangout” as a large graphite drawing depicting me and my friends leaning against the door of our community hall in the back of the Park Place complex. In that image, we were a smaller cluster of figures, amidst the paved parking spaces and the long chain link fence that divided the back of Park Place from the single family homes that made up the rest of our neighborhood. Every motel and housing complex that I’ve ever seen has a border, a boundary, like that chain link fence.

With encouragement from Mr. Prinsen (which meant a lot to me), I entered my large drawing of “The Hangout” into the BC Young Artists competition. It only earned me an honourable mention – a result I was pleased with. On the letter of congratulations from the judging committee, I saw the name signed was “Tom Hudson”. I wondered who that was and who else might have judged my drawing.