MASTERING PEN AND INK
story and art by Jameson Currier
(September, 2017) I did this drawing my first day in a class called “Mastering Pen and Ink” and when the instructor looked at it she laughed. I had taken a seat in the back of the classroom at the midtown art school because that’s where I felt most comfortable—at the back of the room, being able to observe everything being taught and how the other students handled the information and the teaching and the assignments. I was shocked that there was a live model present for the class to draw—I had not seen that mentioned in the class description when I had decided to register for the class and I had only taken a few art classes that used a live model—and was aghast when the live model (a young woman, probably in her late twenties) stepped onto the platform at the center of the room and promptly dropped the shift dress she was wearing to her ankles, stepped out of it, and kicked it to the side. She sat on a folding chair and struck an unnatural artistic pose as if this was the most natural thing for her to do. She was fully nude, hands crossed above her lap, which was when I diverted my astonished expression and took a seat in a folding chair and set about drawing as the instructor instructed—first in a light yellow ink pen to find the shapes and forms and dimensions of the seated nude young woman, then darkening them in with an orange ink pen and next adding highlights with a brown ink pen. This was a technique the instructor had perfected herself and the genesis behind the reason for the class. She had started the class by passing around samples of her yellow-orange-brown ink artwork, all impressive and properly artistic in what I imagine as outstanding art produced by instructors of art schools and accepted by those who run them and want to attend the classes.
In retrospect, I realize the instructor’s laugh was not because I had produced a clever caricature of the nude young woman, but because she found my artistic style to be an inappropriate or silly one to be displaying in a class at such a well-regarded and historic art school in Manhattan (where, by the way, the year before I had taken a class in learning to draw caricatures better where there was no live model present). It was a condescending laugh because the instructor followed it with the admonition, “Well, you’re sitting in the front of the room next class,” as if I had wasted both my time and hers. I tried to explain to her that this was my skill set, how I drew, and how I wanted to draw, but I failed to mention the last item because I was mentally accessing whether I wanted to return for another class. It was a four day class, three and a half hours in the morning starting at a time when my sixty-one year old body was hardly awake, and each day I would have to take the subway downtown to put in the mandatory hours at my dysfunctional day job, trying to catch up on answering the river of emails that arrived whether or not I was at my desk. There were twelve students in this class, four guys and eight women, of varying ages and skill sets, but all artists who were drawing in the instructor’s respectable manner except for me. Thankfully, in the introductory minutes where all the students had all sat around a table and introduced ourselves, I had tagged myself as a writer, not as an artist, so I had hoped that offered a somewhat proper excuse for my talent, or seemingly lack thereof.
The instructor’s dismissive response reverberated throughout the rest of my day. I wondered if I had misrepresented the young woman. She was young with a curvy figure, meaty limbs, large breasts, with an even, pale skin tone across her body. To me her most impressive feature was the dense, cascading ringlets of her light and dark brown hair. I remember as the class started the last thing I wanted to draw was a nude woman. When I had finished my first sketch I had hesitated about drawing in the model’s nipples. I will admit that as a gay man I don’t have a lot of experience with the size and shapes of women’s nipples and I thought this model’s nipples were large and light-skinned and I thought that as an artist presented with a nude female model it was my responsibility to draw the nipples along with everything else. Thinking my initial drawing was incomplete, I had drawn in nipples in orange pen; at the time, I remember wondering if by doing so, by drawing in the nipples, had I objectified her? Turned a woman of character into a woman of character with nipples? As I sat in my office at my desk later, I could not remember if any other student had drawn in nipples in their artwork and I felt like a failure. Had the female instructor laughed at my drawing not because it was a caricature, but because it was a caricature with nipples?
I returned to the workshop the following day, walking into the classroom and brightly saying to the instructor, “I came back!” Overnight I had decided that regardless of the dismissive opinion of my art and skill set, it would be good for me to practice, I did not draw enough or practice enough drawing. And after all, I had paid handsomely to take the course and did not want to fight anyone in the administration office of the art school for a refund, and I was lucky that no grade was being given for the art I could or could not draw. And, as a plus, being miserable in an art class was better than being miserable at my desk at my dysfunctional day job.
The instructor wanted me to sit in the front row, but there were only seats on the extreme sides of the semicircle of chairs that had been set up, and I felt that I was no good at drawing profiles, so I compromised and placed a chair behind the center of the front row so I could have a full frontal view. As she did the day before, the model disrobed and struck an unnatural artistic pose. The object of the day’s lesson was to learn how to draw a body by partitioning it off into sections, and then to concentrate on shading and shadowing the figure as the lights and shadows on the skin were represented to the eye. A few months before the class, in my ongoing effort to become a better artist, I had watched several online videos on how to draw the full female and male physiques, so I understood the figure techniques that the instructor was explaining. I had watched the videos because I had wanted to learn how to draw fashion sketches in hopes that it would help me expand my style and skill set.
When it was time for us to draw, I realized several things: how claustrophobic it was to sit so close to the platform and the other students, and how strange it seemed that all the other students were drawing the nude model realistically in such an unrealistic set up, posed in an unnatural way on a platform in a classroom. I suppose that’s why I have always liked candid photos over portraits. Portraits seldom reveal anything about the subject, only capturing an object at a certain moment of time, in a pose with the lights and shadows–same with still life—whereas a candid may reveal something of a situation and a personality behind the stopped motion. I suppose that’s why I am preferential to drawings that seem to have a narrative behind them—I liked drawings that go somewhere, reveal something, or keep something a mystery.
So I also realized that I did not want to draw a stationary nude female figure. This feeling had also overwhelmed me the day before, when I had drawn an overhead light fixture that was in the classroom. Today, I drew the fan that was cooling the model as she sat unmoving.
When the instructor arrived at my chair to check my work, I flipped to a sketch I had started and began filling out the hair. “Are you going to spend all your time on the hair?” she asked. The instructor had a lovely British accent, lilting, like the actress Emily Watson, if you know who she is. But the question arrived with a stern emphasis behind it, making me think of a nanny scolding children. I calmly explained to the instructor that once I finished the hair, I intended to shade the shoulders and arms. I left class the second day wondering if I should show up for the next one.
At work the class continued to haunt me, or, rather, the idea that the other students might see me as an old man lecherously drawing a nude young woman because I had never self-identified myself as being a gay man. In measuring the model to translate the height and width of her to the page, I had been instructed to outstretch my hand holding a pen and find the size of her head and then use that size to measure the other distances of her nude torso. It made me feel more creepy than skillful and I had kept my drawings nippleless. The model’s facial expression also read “blank” to me, without any display of emotion or character, so I felt defeated before I even began to put something on paper.
On the third day, the model’s first pose was seated and wearing a dress. I was grateful that she was clothed, but still found it difficult to capture her form in a chair. Our lesson that day was to color in the dress with one of the ink markers that had been on the supply list for the class. When I had located them at the art store, I had decided to buy a set of six markers in tones of blue and green and I had used a blue marker to shade the dress and side of the hair in my drawing. When the instructor noted that there were only a few minutes left in this pose before the model would take a break and we would display our work for all of the other students to see. I panicked, thinking my drawing was too flat, and began to experiment with a patchwork design of the color stripes around the drawing of the model in the chair, in part, to deflect from the flatness of the drawing.
It met with success, because it was different from the other drawings and gave my drawing a movement it otherwise lacked. The instructor expressed her admiration of the technique to the class and I felt more confident about allowing my artistic voice to expand.
Our next project was to draw with a white pen on colored paper. The model posed topless with fabric draped as if it were a gown. We were not to concentrate on shadows and shading, but to outline the drawing with the white pen. I drew the model faceless and nippleless and added an outline only along her body, not the fabric. When the instructor arrived at my chair to inspect my drawing she praised it and added, “And you can make the dress much longer.”
Tears welled in my eyes and I thought, Really? Really? I can make a bigger dress? So I started the drawing over, this time determined to use the orange pen to create a work of art. During the next show and tell, I felt my work stood up well with all of the other students, some of which was extraordinary. I left the class happy and tired, though the feeling was fleeting once I arrived at the dysfunctional day job and was immediately sucked into an issue involving the salary of a highly compensated executive in France. A conference call was arranged to take place the following morning and I found myself repeatedly telling co-workers that I could not participate, though I refused to tell anyone it was because I had an art class to attend.
On the morning of the last class I overslept. I showered but did not have time to shave and I realized that I had left my cellphone on my office desk and would not be able to monitor my emails about the conference call during the art class. Because of the class I had not been eating properly, not that I ever eat properly but I had been eating more improperly than usual and this morning, in addition to being unshaven, I was constipated and felt bloated. My shoes felt like cement blocks. I wanted to skip the class but if I went to work I would be sucked into the conference call I did not want to participate in. I arrived to the class sweating and disheveled and grumpy, explaining that I had overslept, and draping myself in a sweater because the excessive air conditioning that morning in the classroom was turning my sweat into icicles.
Our lesson for the day was to draw in ballpoint pen on watercolor paper and then color it with watercolor or acrylic paint and the class began with the instructor demonstrating the technique.
The watercolor paper on the supply list for the class was specified as “hot press.” When I had asked for it at the art store, I was informed that it was a special, expensive item that was kept behind a locked counter and would be waiting for me at the check-out register to purchase with my other items. To keep the weight of the bag lighter that held all the supplies I carted to and from each class, I had opened the heavy, special, expensive watercolor paper pad and was mystified on how to remove a sheet of paper. A label on the cover said, “Insert palette knife here to withdraw paper.” Against my better judgment at using a knife to pry a sheet of paper out of a plastic womb, I finally succeeding in removing three pages from the pad, one of which I gave away to a French woman who was a student in the class who had shown up without paper (and whose drawings I admired more day after day). And I had so little confidence in using this expensive paper in class that I had also ripped out three “cold press” sheets from a cheaper watercolor pad I already owned and slipped them into the bag I carried to class.
The brand of ballpoint pen was not specified on the class supply list, though it had been suggested it should be of blue ink and could be as cheap as possible, even something one might find in a hotel room. The day before the instructor had also given a short talk on the history of the ball point pen and its use by other artists.
On this last day, the model’s back was toward the class and the bottom of her torso was draped with fabric as if it were another ball gown. I was so tired that I sat in the back of the room again, despite the potential consequences of a reprimand about doing so, drawing while seated on a stool. Again, I felt uninspired drawing a nude female figure in an unnatural pose and situation until I began to draw the fabric hanging on the wall behind the model and imagine the drawing as a representative of some kind of a gothic scenario. The instructor arrived beside me and reminded me to continue to measure the model to get everything into perspective, and to instruct that I draw the shadows and shading on the model’s skin, even demonstrating crosshatching on my drawing, but she left telling me I was doing a good job.
To color in the drawing I used a watercolor set I had found on the Internet which had a flesh tone that I found useful in the drawings I had been painting at my apartment. I placed my ink drawing on an easel and painted the gown and the fabric, noting that the watercolor paint applied to the hot press paper was dripping more than it generally did on the cold press paper. I liked the effect of the drip and thought it enhanced my gothic fantasy scenario and began to add more and more. But then the weight of paint tipped the paper off the easel and it fell to the floor, the lines smeared, and I had to start the dripping over again. By the time I had finished it, the instructor was encouraging the class to work on their second drawing of the day, something I had not even begun.
At this point I was exhausted and dehydrated and just wanted the class to end, and I wasn’t about to waste another piece of expensive hot press paper drawing with a cheap ball point pen, so I found a sheet of the cold press watercolor paper in my bag and decided I would only do the model’s face for a final drawing. For four days I had kept an image in my mind of the model’s hair cascading over her eyelashes (and yes, a very strange image for a gay man to hold onto). So I walked to the side of the semicircle of chairs, looked at the model’s profile, and returned to my stool and began to draw her hair with feverish quick swirls of the ball point pen. I finished drawing and coloring well before the other students completed their second work and I sat and waited for the paint to dry. When the instructor arrived to inspect my work, she was quite taken aback. I explained that I was too tired to draw anything else, but she was highly complimentary of the drawing, in a way she had never been before of my other work. At our final class show and tell she pointed out this drawing to the students, noting that while she had hoped to break me of it, it continued to display my particular style and desire for experimentation.
