Okay, so.
Drawing. Right.
I put pencil to paper. Everyone else is producing the sort of sweeping scritcha-scratches that can only mean masterpiece. I’ve flipped to a new, accusatorily blank page. It’s judging me.This is all you’ve got?
I press the tip of my pencil to the middle of the page and study Pavel. I study hisface.Thank you very much. (His dick, by the way, just happens to be flopped against his leg. Socasual. Business casual. A total yawn. It couldn’t care less about me. It has its own purpose in life and will not be judged. I immediately resolve to be much more like this model’s dick.)
Anyways. Drawing.
I guess…I’ll start…with the nose? Why did I start with the nose? Oh, my gosh, no, has anyone else ever realized how phallic a nose can be? Oh, get a life, Roz! You’re in a fine arts class intended to better yourself! You’re surrounded by sophisticates! (Presumably.) Quick! Draw ears! That’ll help.
I get the right one down in a wrinkly crescent moon and the timer dings halfway through the left.
I’m aghast. Horrified.
I lift my traitorous pencil.
“Huh, you went straight for the genitalia, huh?”
Says a woman who introduces herself to me as Cindy. She’s standing behind me now, leaning over my shoulder, studying my unintentionally obscene drawing.
“Awesome,” she says, and seems to mean it. “Most newbies avoid the crotch area altogether. Way to dive in.”
She gives me a thumbs-up that I couldn’t return if it saved my life. My hands creep up over my face.
“I didn’t. I swear.” I’m terrified the model overheard her. Or anyone has heard her.
So much for cool and sophisticated. One round with a model and now I’m the class pervert.
I scramble to turn the page on my incriminating drawing but unfortunately there’s a crowd gathering behind me.
“I love newbie day,” says someone.
“I should have drawn a stick figure,” I lament. At least I’d have my dignity.
“Roz!” says Daniel, weaving through the crowd to get to me. “This is so wonderful. Can I discuss your drawing with the class?”
“Ohmygodwhy.”
Everyone laughs, but it’s friendly and indulgent. I get the sudden feeling that almost all of them have survived a very similar gauntlet.
“Your drawing brings up a concept I’d love to lecture on.”
I glance at the crowd and am greeted by multiple open and expectant faces.
Esther switches her glasses from distance to readers. A redheaded, middle-aged man named Reggie pulls out a notebook and pen. Apparently Daniel’s lectures are a prized part of this class. It becomes clear to me that there is only one path forward. Yup. The only thing to do here is own it.
I sigh and step back.
Daniel gestures for the class to scrunch in so they can see. He lifts the terra-cotta pencil from behind his ear again and, to my surprise, as he talks, he draws directly on my drawing.
“What Roz has highlighted with this drawing is the seemingly accidental, but wholly repeatable,organic rhythms.”
Around my scratchy, double-lined drawing he fluidly, gorgeously adds a cranium, eyes, a neck, a mouth, shoulders. With elegant, sweeping lines, he’s just given my little drawing a home.
And then below it, he does a reproduction of my original lines. The nose and ears I’d hacked my way through. Only, this time he draws legs and hips and thighs around them. Turning those lines, yes, into a crotch area. “See, here, as we’ve discussed countless times, a body has a rhythm. It correlates to itself. Parts of it look like other parts of it.” He’s in the zone like an athlete as his arm sweeps and retracts. “There is inherent curve. Ratio that is repeatable. Meaningful. If this drawing were a poem, I’d say that Roz found arefrain.And she used it here, in this stanza.” He goes back up to my original drawing and adds an elegant set of eyelashes and a smattering offreckles that call forth the model so readily it raises the hairs on my arm. “And it can be found again in this stanza.” He refers to the crotch he’s drawn and gives it a torso, connecting shoulders and clavicle to the drawing of the face above, joining them to be one Pavel. He uses the posed elbow on the knee as a place marker and skips gracefully down the page, riding on a shin, to draw one-through-ten perfectly askance toes.
He steps back and eyes the whole thing. “There’s an honesty in what Roz drew that speaks of trueness. Could we immediately decipher which body part this was? Perhaps not. But there is a big, logical, recognizable honesty in it that ringstrue.Roz drew a body part.This is a real body of a real person!Her lines tell us.”
