Just got out of another super-frustrating drawing class, where I was scolded what felt like every thirty seconds by a professor that I like, despite her unfiltered bluntness that has probably developed from years of teaching drawing to pigheaded, easily frustrated dimwits such as myself.

I'm slowly - this is after taking five or six art classes in my college career - figuring out exactly how I operate visually with two- and three-dimensional art.

1. I like to work big.

I've only just kind of figured this out now, as in, at the end of the class I just left today, because this is the third professor to recommend that I get larger paper. After class, I met with the girl who sits next to me (who's quite good - I know her from Vagina Monologues) and she echoed the comment. She also agreed with the professor that part of my frustration has to do with my big, dark, dynamic lines meeting the physical edge of the paper and not being able to continue. So... I like to work large-scale.

2. I like everything dark and messy.

I hate little, light, soft pieces of charcoal. I like the big, thick kind, the kind that gets everywhere and smudges and smears. I hate soft, indecisive lines.

3. I like media that fight back.

This is, I think, the most important revelation that I've had.

When I was taking painting, I ditched my brushes halfway through the semester and started using my hands and fingers (and occasionally arms) to paint. I made a bunch of really cool paintings of things like pots and kettles and vases, all on this thick, textured paper.

I thought that I'd really like working on canvas, once we moved onto that from paper, but I actually didn't. My paintings on canvas (more so the prestretched canvas, not so much the one that I built myself) were kind of blegh. They didn't really move and flow and hum like the stuff on paper. I realize now it's because unlike the paper (which was either on a desk or a board on an easel), which resisted my fingers and made me fight for the shape and texture, the canvas just sort of stretched and bounced and was flexible and didn't provide any resistance at all. The result is that I only made one canvas painting that I felt was worth saving (and gave it to my parents for Christmas) and about 15 paper pieces that I really loved - and all of them of ordinary objects that had no extraordinary properties.

4. I work fast. I just do. This makes my professor insane. But I just... I feel like the things that I'm drawing are giving me an emotional and aesthetic impression, and I have to just go with that impression and get it down, y'know?



When I paint, and when I draw, and when I use clay, everything is big. The motions are big, the energy, the force of my arms. I like that.

And this is why drawing is making me nuts. She wants light, precise drawings. There is nothing light or precise about me. We are at an impasse.

(Also, yesterday in my ceramics class, my professor stopped by my table, gave me advice on various things I could improve on, and then ended with "I really, really like your pieces. They have a very strong narrative to them - it doesn't feel like you're just making a pot, or a vase, or..." She looked at something I was working on, "... a shot glass. I feel like each one of them has a story." Up until that moment, she hadn't really said much of anything about my work at all, and I had this idea in the back of my mind that she hated everything I was doing.)

So, in conclusion: I know that I need to just suck it up and stop being so curmudgeon-y and try to do what my professor is telling me, and not take everything she says about what I'm doing so personally, but I'm stubborn and I have a really hard time doing so. Also, I need to go buy bigger paper.

I have, like, exactly three minutes to write this entry, because I have to do a million things before tomorrow and I have to get started on them very soon.

But I though that it was worth mentioning that today in my ceramics class I made a box that looked like a vagina (which started out accidentally and ended purposefully) and managed to thoroughly freak out the sorority girl sitting next to me. And then, after sitting at staring at it for a good five minutes, I turned and asked her if I should put a hoop or a stud through the labia.

This icon is so totally appropriate.

Okay, off to do work.

(Oh, and by the way, I chose hoop!)