I did an art class this morning, and it was truly like being in a sitcom.
My Lovely better half had bought me the course as a present as i keep getting frustrated that i can’t draw very well in my animations and want to know how to do it properly.
So off I went this morning to go to school for the first time in about ten years.
Getting there showed me (as so often in my life) that I hadn’t thought things through, that the other people taking part in an art class on a tuesday morning in greenwich wouldn’t be other standup comics or other types of windswept and interesting people, but the elderly, wishing to better themselves in retirement.
A bit harsh, not all elderly, but i felt like quite significantly the youngest one in there.
I’d rushed over the park in clean jeans and a foggy head and so had no change on me whatsoever, meaning that I could buy a coffee… ho-hum.
But, I was then asked for 20p, to buy a piece of drawing paper for the lesson, unless that was I’d brought my own sketch pad. I hadn’t and had to cough up. Only I couldn’t.
so, already looking like a benefit scrounger without a proper job and spare time to better myself I had to promise that I’d come in next week with 20p, if I hadn’t spent it on heroin.
I was instructed to get an easel and drawing board and was leant a pencil and eraser. I nearly tripped over some shit in the middle of the room.
it was that shit I was to draw. Not actual waste, but a scattering of easels, chairs, desks and buckets. “To be drawn in pencil only with no shading or hatching”
Sounded easy. It wasn’t. The more I tried to get things in one part of the drawing right the worse other bits became, when lines that all started off in the right angles didn’t end up meeting where they should.
Maybe I should have used my own paper, not this voodoo stuff.
The teacher (called Terry) was encouraging to the others, but whenever he came to me he looked disappointed as I erased and sighed and drew and cried.
It wasn’t helped by the fact that the two people on either side of me were properly good and so my scrawl looked even more pathetic.
By the end of the lesson I wanted to run away, but we had to show the rest of the class our work. As everyone turned theirs round I breathed a sigh of relief, aside from the two protégés on either side, everyone else was as shit (or shitter) than me.
I am bettering myself by being competitive with the elderly.
I’ll offer another report next week…