A hard Sunday's work

Summers of Art

Art and I have a love hate relationship - the love is all from my side and the hate all from the other. I have always loved to draw and paint since I was a child. I didn't so much like going to art contests unless it was the on the spot kind, where you could make up your own worlds from your imagination. I like drawing in detail. Where somebody might choose to draw a single dominating entity in a painting, I would rather draw a million tiny pictures complete with the latch on a house's front door. My technique however has always been flawed, despite or because of multiple art classes I have had.

When summer holidays came up, we always headed to my grandparents' house for a relaxing month or so. Since I was prone to be a couch potato, more often than not and did my holiday homework, we had plenty of that, at the absolute last minute, I was kicked out of the house for art classes to a nearby school. Best part of it was that it was right across the road and I could go there all by myself. What surprises me from the classes I remember and the assignments she gave me was how I didn't end up hating art. What does a seven year old understand of shadows and light? She had a class of much older years and I was the odd man out. Half of my book pages were filled with eraser smudges and clueless shading in lieu of appropriate shadows.

The story was repeated when I attempted to take after school art classes. I wanted to be in this boisterous gang of my classmates and friends who were in the lower art class, fooling around more often than drawing. Little did I know what I was getting into. I was put again in the advanced class. We had a super old curmudgeon of a teacher, she was an excellent artist to say the least, but a very bad teacher. We were a bunch of about 10 unfortunate students. It was difficult to sweat over a cheetah when you knew on the other side of the wall, people were drawing flower bouquets and stick men figures. Our topics were always unusual and challenging. But it gave me a lifelong trauma of joints and movement. I definitely did not learn in all the time I spent in that class about proportion. My paintings are still filled with disproportionate limbs. My characters move with the elegance of an actor in his first movie. 

I moved to the other class, but needless to say, I didn't learn anything. The most I learnt were in my school art classes and the one oil painting class that I took thankfully at an appropriate age, when I actually understood what the teacher was saying. Apart from these scheduled learning periods, a lot of my spare time in my summer holidays were spent in painting and drawing. I would stock up on paints and other material from the R.S. Shoppe on L.B. Road in Chennai and spend many pleasant afternoons over some glass painting or canvas. I also used my pictures to cheer up my hostel rooms. So reminiscing over all my old artwork,  I decided today was a great day to immortalize some of them on the world wide web.