Article

Quit to Get Ahead

THE STARVING ART STUDENT

I was once a real starving art student, working two part-time jobs after school and weekends to pay an expensive private art college tuition - and barely getting by.

As a fine art photography student I felt out of place in the required oil painting class. With a minimum of drawing and painting background, I didn’t have the needed manual dexterity or brushwork skills. Even with a good design sense and a better knowledge of color theory than the others, I was very worried about that class. And the mediocre pictures I produced throughout the semester didn’t help.

DISASTER STRIKES

Then disaster struck. The teacher announced that our grade for the whole semester would be based on just one painting, to be completed during the last day of class. The pressure was on - and that was the week I ran out of both money and materials!

I was really down and worried. After a lot of wasted energy of the “why me?” and “how could I let this happen?” kind, I finally faced reality the night before class.

There was no solution in sight. I was not going to be able to show up with a stretched and primed canvas and a set of paints, made from materials purchased at the school store. It was already too late for that. And I wasn’t going to improve my skills, literally over night, either. So I gave up.

GIVING UP

But I didn’t exactly quit. Instead, my attitude changed unexpectedly. Somewhere inside, I’d realized that things were simply as they were. Nothing was going to change and I would just have to deal with it. So, without realizing what was happening or actually planning anything, I started dealing with it. “Full speed ahead and damn the torpedoes”, as they used to say.

Digging around the garage of my rented place and that of a friend, I found a broken window in a frame, some burlap bags and some old tubes of pigment, the kind meant to be squeezed into 5 gallon cans of white paint at a paint store. So, I broke the glass out of the frame, stretched a burlap bag over it and brought that and the pigment tubes to painting class the next morning.

GOING FOR BROKE

Under no illusion that I was going to get by with this charade, I felt a devilish delight in attacking that ‘canvas’ and couldn’t have cared less about the outcome. Okay, I was already torpedoed, but that didn’t mean I couldn’t enjoy the ride on the way down.

Well, the next thing I knew, I was stepping back for a first look at the shapes, forms colors, and composition I’d just put down. In a daze, I realized that it was finished – any more would be too much.

As you’ve probably guessed, that was by far the best painting I ever made and the instructor thought I deserved an ‘A” for the semester. How much he factored in for tenacity and audacity I’ll never know.