I was back at my art class the other day. And it was the first lesson that was well and truly horrendous.
The idea was to make a collage of the naked pictures we’d drawn a few lesson ago. We were told to bring a newspaper (weirdly specifically told to bring ‘yesterdays Guardian’) to make it with, along with some PVA glue.
Upon arrival we were told that we couldn’t use colour, only black and white bits of paper, so text, or B&W photos. I spent the first twenty minutes or so just going through and ripping out nice bits (and reading the paper, I hadn’t even looked at it since buying it in the newsagent the day before on the way to avoid a beating)
When I’d amassed a nice pile I commenced with my first mistake of many…
I seem to have a link between brain and paper missing, a truly vital link, the one that works out what things might look like before they are done.
With pencil this matters less as the eraser is my friend, on computers it’s even better thanks to the undo button.
Charcoal has proved a problem, with me drawing lines willy nilly and then immediately regretting the grey sludge on the paper.
I fared worse with glue and paper. Once it’s on there’s not really a lot you can do with the soggy mess other than let it dry and hope it catches fire or something.
So, I began with that first mistake, to do the mattress that she was lying on. I thought I’d be clever and use blocks of text going one way for the top and another way for the sides, making a 3d effect.
At least that was the plan, it actually looked like I’d stuck an article in a scrapbook all wonky.
Then i started to add the lady on, using tiny squares from a photo of a crowd, thinking that each head could be a strand of hair.That didn’t work.
I saw a face in the cryptic crossword and thought that would make a humourous head before cutting out words from an advert to be the arms.
It didn’t look as envisaged, unless i’d envisaged someone dropping their recycling on a wet pavement.
I hadn’t looked at anyone elses work when I decided to use tiny heads for nipples, and then, on my way for a coffee I decided to check out the competition. I was in for a shock.
the others had used the dark and light scraps as tonal shades (as I’m sure was intended in the exercise) and making proper drawings with it, whilst mine was the photofit of a ransom note.
I was so embarrassed I really wanted to rip it up and run away. But instead I made more hair by using strands of black photo but only glueing at one end.
When we did the group gathering round to look at everyone’s work I was dismayed to find people saying nice things about mine, they are clearly either idiots or liars.
I thanked them… then ran away