Three-Quarters View

Three down, one to go. Next week is my last chance to be in the classroom with my mom's students, teaching drawing. Usually I have thirty minutes, but today I only had 20 due to some sort of clerical error.

I'm slightly disappointed in today's experience because the kids didn't get to draw much. The lesson was on drawing heads and faces. The bulk of it was demonstrating four main points:

+ Circle for the skull
+ Angular line for the jaw
+ Equator of the circle for eyes/ears
+ Longitudinal line for nose-direction and symmetry

... then having each kid come up to the whiteboard and identify those things. They traced those key parts on an image projected onto up the board.

Another fun moment was having them feel the spherical shapes of their heads, and how the jawbone connects to the cranium under the ear. Other than the drawing on the board, they didn't get a chance to practice what I was trying to teach.

The rest of the day was a stressful disappointment, except for spending a few minutes with my dad. He's having cataract surgery tomorrow. I've talked to him more in the past 2 days than in the previous couple months. He's the silent type. :)

So some drawing:



And an old-ish poem. Appropriate because I wrote it on an early date with Reagan under the influence of Strongbow, and tonight we had Guinness with our Lilo and Stitch. And I'm sleepy.

Preparing for Sleep


We reach through the bottle and into the past
wagering how long the feeling will last.
Cold comes to batter the bones of my keep
but the soul is warm, the roots are deep.

I love the simplicity of it. Remind me to tell you about Bradbury tomorrow.

When it was time for urgency
I did not act accordingly
Now it's time to say goodnight
but still I'm here and still I write

Tomorrow is my next-to-last session with the drawing kids. After Reagan and I came home from our evening out, I didn't start putting together the pamphlet quickly enough (although I knew what my plan was), and now I'm more than an hour late for bed (though hardly tired).

HOT DAMN

Next week we'll do perspective! If I go Wednesday or Thursday, they'll have gingerbread houses to draw. Rock on.

Another good day, though not productive as I'd like it to be. Too much time spent daydreaming about possibilities outside my control.

The poem today's offering is based on was written in high school, and I was so incredibly proud of it. It was one of mine that made it into the school's literary magazine. I remember we had a hard time laying out that page because the poem is a diptych... or whatever poetry word there is for two columns of poem side by side.

Recall

She says, "Broken."
Then after a pause

asks me what
I remember.


She says, "Red,"
and waits

for me to say
if, behind my
veiled eyes,
I see the autumn
forest, or that
violated house
that used to be
a rosy home.


"Yes," I say,
noting the color
inside my eyelids.

... and more drawings. Today I did better at doodling in a bookstore cafe. Probably because I never want to spend money at Borders, but I'm always anxious to browse at B&N.

Up out of habit

It's been a long day. It started early with a nice breakfast of eggs, toast, and tea with my husband, even though he's not feeling amazing.

Session four of talking to kids about drawing went pretty well. The mass of the class has been weeded down to six or so girls. While I'm sad that I failed to engage the ones who aren't showing up any more, short sessions mean that I have to give a targeted lesson, which has a narrow scope of interest. If you're not interested in learning anatomy, there's not much I can do.

Hm. Focus on the good things. To go along with the torso references I had printed in the handouts that I whipped up last night, I projected a few on the whiteboard and had a few of them step up and practice locating the skull, ribcage, and shoulder line of the references by tracing them on the whiteboard. There was also a cool moment of teaching how the collarbone indicates what someone's shoulders are doing.

The biggest struggle is getting them to find the sweet spot of sketching fast to achieve line control and drawing slow to achieve line accuracy.

I always feel like I'm drawing poorly around them. My demo drawings are usually done while I'm talking and also working fast because time is so limited. But I feel like they're awful and don't properly illustrate what I'm trying to convey. BLEH.

Got home, tried to restart my day by doing some reading that I hoped would turn into a nap. It didn't, but I found the passage of past continuous that I've been waiting for.

Waiting is the wrong word. It implies that I needed or expected it to happen, neither of which are true. Even if the whole book had passed without something like this particular scene occurring, I wouldn't count it as a waste of time. Shabtai's style is, without a doubt, an acquired taste. I'm glad I've acquired it, but even without me adapting to his rambling style, I would have seen the scene of Israel and his roommate's lady friend throwing a knife at the wooden board as beautiful. It is at risk of falling into my own personal trope of "every emotion leads to sex", and also does nothing to buck the trend of nobody in the book being both happy and faithful, but I still enjoyed it. After reading the passage once, I immediately thought "this needs to be a poem" and wrote down the concept and the page number on a sticky note.

Maybe I should have taken a stab at it then. I'm sure not in the mood now. But I give this rhyme some effort and time...

what moves?


Outside my window
small ones dwell
between the leaves
and in the well.

Sometimes they dance
while I do sleep;
more oft in dreams
I hear them weep.

They curse the caging
garden wall
each time winds bring
the wild's call.

I mourn with them:
I have roots, too,
but I can hide
from freedom's view.

There, I found the energy to double the size! And I avoided referring to the sky as blue! Twice the victory.

Between reading my book and reaching this point of stretching my brain, I discovered another season of CSI:NY on Netflix, sorted a couple thousand files, and eked out some pages of drawing in my sketchbook, including prelim doodles for one of those opportunities I've been considering.

This is not those doodles (but the bird in the upper right is one of my favorite things right now):



Oh, that reminds me to share this mind-blowing-ly bizarre music video.

Eeeek!

Today was very stressful. Except for that part where I was running errands alone for a few hours. That was only slightly stressful. (The errand-running wasn't stressful, my overall level of anxiety was just lower.)

I have zero confidence in the classroom. But I'm going back anyways, at least tomorrow. =\

In a strange way, if I had made up my mind on what to teach three hours earlier, or six hours earlier, or one hour earlier than I did, it would not have lowered my stress level. The only reason I'll be able to sleep is because I ran out of seconds to second guess.

Now look at photographs (scans) of the good old days...




And listen to music of the good old times...

Not exactly feel-good poetry today, but the music it was written to [youtube] makes me feel good, in a cathartic, melancholy kind of way. Don't watch the video. It's really creepy (huge eyes on real people) and is not at all what I imagine listening to the song.

The Longest Night

I think of the date we never took,
the time we never went to France.
The day was hot
but night came quickly;
the sun spied us sitting together
and could not set fast enough.
He pulled the warmth down into the sea.

You saw my sweater,
offered to hold it.
I wanted to be so immodest.
I wanted my shivers to draw you closer,
my sweater forgotten.
But I wrapped myself to stay warm.

It was the longest night.

I remember the cafe we dined in
and the story I told you there
Both were tinged with longing for the Old World.

The walls were painted with nostalgia
and I saw the matron
standing by the door
Lost in thought, lost in memories
lost memories.
Her hair looked like and exhausted sunrise,
the sunrise in my story.

I spun a tale about a place I'd never been
but we both longed for.
Your eyes, your smile
took us to the castles, courtyards, queens.
The danger, the intrigue,
the gardens with tame swans.

I said words
you gave them light.
Our soup grew cold.

It was the longest night.

*marks it as "revisit more"*

Finally! More about the classroom!

Top of the pile today, the high holiday of consumerism for our religion of capitalism, is making art with kids.

Last Thursday was my second day in the classroom talking to 5th graders about drawing. In the 30 minutes I have, it's hard to slow down and really teach. As exhilarating it is to get out there and impression young minds, I tend to worry I'm doing it all wrong.

I spent the first hour and a half putting together individual sketchbooks for the kids




And bound a few of the extras as proof-of-concept that, should a kid exceed the bounds of their first sketchbook, I would be able to collect multiple volumes together in a single compendium



Stapler binding for the win!

The first page has chatter about drawing in the form of Frequently Asked Questions [img]. The last page has suggestions for How and What to Draw [img].

What I wanted them to take away from the lesson was the value of quick, light lines. I demonstrated by doing rough gestural drawings on the whiteboard, and instructed them to do four in pencil and four in pen, to try different mediums. When our time was up, I collected their sketchbooks and spent another ninety minutes giving individual comments and suggestions via sticky notes.






This coming week I have Monday and Tuesday available, we'll see what my mom offers me. It's pretty clear to me that some time with basic anatomy would be well spent, I'm just not sure how to do it. Reference photos and sketching each one twice while talking about it? My mom suggested that I give more time for individual demonstrations to sink in.

I think my main talking points will be

+ Identifying the torso-shape
+ Head/chest proportions.
+ Doing those things in life drawing

The handout will also include notes on shoulders and spines, plus some fresh drawing mantras. (ie: "draw what you see, not what you think you see")

More about how awesomely productive today is, plus your daily poem/sketches after I make all those things happen.

Skimming the surface of sleep

I can't tell where I am relative to the beginning or end of my day. Since my last post I...

+ Spent a hectic 30 minutes with about 10 kids from my mom's class. Description and after-thoughts posted here.

+ Thought some about my plan of attack for Thursday's class, crashed around 3pm and got 6 hours of sleep

+ Woke up, spent some time online to catch up with friends I hadn't talked to for a couple days

+ Wrote the first half of the drawing advice I'll be including in the sketchbooks. Devised a drawing-as-your-personal-visual-language metaphor.

+ Tried to sleep more, watched Red Dwarf. o.O

+ Slept about 20 minutes. Woke up and wrote the second half of the drawing advice, including 67 ideas of things to draw.

+ Snuggled with Reagan, dozed more. I feel like I haven't spent time with my husband for ages.

+ Sketched and brushed the dog.

+ Got ready for day 2! (printed things out, gathered more of my sketchbooks for show and tell, etc)

I'm currently remote posting from my dad's computer downstairs to avoid bothering Reagan with my light and noise. He'll be sleeping another 4 hours.

... I just realized that this remote posting means no scans to upload. I'll include some with today's debriefing, as I'm sure I'll want to talk about it and be more alert than I was yesterday.

Busyness and being out of sorts means I haven't gotten time with my poetry. So here's something from high school I really don't understand:

Forgiveness

It doesn't matter the style of your clothes,
Only who designed them, and that they are your own.

It doesn't matter where you got them from,
Only where you wear them and why you go those places.

It doesn't matter how many places you go,
Only that you try not to get stains on yourself.

It doesn't matter that you did mess up those clothes,
Only that you notice and try your hardest to clean them soon.

It doesn't matter where you go to clean you clothes,
Only that you do it yourself and use lots of bleach.

What was I thinking? I think it fits with a quote I found on a sticky note while gathering sketchbooks. If you can't convince them, confuse them. -- Harry Truman I love quotations that encourage absurdity.

To make up for that lameness, I urge you to go listen to Danny Sherrard perform his poem "We Are Prometheus" over at IndieFeed. I caught the podcast of it recently and it blew me away. Incredibly inspiring and incredibly humbling.

I'm off to teach children about drawing! :D

Nervous + tired = bad!

Early last week I talked to my mom about doing a drawing workshop for her class, then spent several hours writing an outline. I didn't hear back, so I reminded her a few days ago and she told me it had slipped her mind and she needed to clear it with her principal. Yesterday around 11pm my mom asks if I can come do my first session today or Thursday.

We start discussing the bigger and smaller questions I have about what to expect, and what schedules look like daily, weekly, and for the rest of the year. As I haven't been around 5th grade kids.... since I was in elementary school... I decide that I should use one session to acclimate myself, like leaving a new fish in the bag when you first put it in the aquarium so the water temperatures can equalize. Except me and 11 year olds.

As there's no school next week (they get a long Thanksgiving holiday!) it means two full weeks between the first session and the second. With each session only being 30 minutes, my expectations of retention are low.

Short story long, I decided to use both Wednesday and Thursday to make my impression. That left me with under 12 hours to prepare and made my classroom debut coincide with my projected bedtime. Hijinx ensue.

In reality it was more like, stress induced mood-swings ensued.

I spent much of the first 8 hours trying to calm down and concoct an elegant plan to both pitch my workshop to the class at large in the 10 minutes before their lunch break and fill the 30 minutes of time we'd have for chatting.

Needless to say, there have been few opportunities in my day to do my own drawing, polish up today's poem, or write tomorrow's hand out. Well, after some yoga and a shower, I will be drawing before going to school.

Despite how neurotic I feel right now, I think this project is going to be good for me over the next few weeks.



With poem posting, I wanted to start with revising the old stuff that had potential or posting stuff that induced painful laughter. But, again, today didn't go as planned, so here's some ars poetica I meant to post when my site was down. It probably needs a little more tweaking. It belongs to a hypothetical chapbook called "A Self-Aware Collection". This all happened before I learned about the term "ars poetica".


Sentience

I start blank
with no dimension
then a dot
and then a line
a paragraph
a rounded thought
then I expand
to take up time

But that is
my last performance
can't turn a phrase
save plane or face
no back up trick
no animation
a fritter of time
a filling of space

No annotations
lines and arrows
strings to make me
dance and sing
I lack allusions
uncolored, unshaded
Do I lose depth
with history?