Summer Sketching

Today, with clouds looming in the distance, teacher Monika and I led with slight trepidation a group of thirteen kids out onto the grounds--to a patch of apple trees--for our Summer Sketch Club. The projects have been getting increasingly complex as July and August wear on, and today the kids had a particularly challenging one. We were talking about perspective, which is often hard even for adult artists to fully capture. In my one and only studio course in college last fall (required for my Art History major), I listened fuzzily as my professor explained vanishing points again and again. Half the time I couldn't even tell if a line in whatever I was trying to draw went up or down. I drew buildings as if I was floating above them and often arrived at the middle of a sketch to discover that all the different elements were grossly disproportional. Once while drawing outdoors, when I thought I wasn't doing too terribly after all, an old man stopped in his tracks and started coaching me on how to draw a straight line. It was that bad.

So I have to admit, I was a little worried for these thirteen kids. Their assignment was to pick a view--of the historic Linwood house, or perhaps a bench off in the distance, or a flowery bush--or Norman Rockwell's very own, very red studio. They were to do one drawing "zoomed out" of their view, another a little closer, and a third picture very "close up," like of the window at Linwood, the details of the flower, or the siding and shrubs of the studio. Their materials were paper and pencil, both graphite and colored. We explained the project and sent the kids out to find a special spot, visiting their concentrated hunched-over heads every so often to see how things were going.

All I have to say is, these kids really could have taught me something while I was plodding away in my painting class last fall, drawing a line only to go back and erase it right away. They plunged ahead, fearless as they pressed pencil to paper to make dark purple and green lines for the Linwood roof and the deep scarlet of a flower in the back gardens. Two little girls who were sisters began so far away and wished to get so close to their subjects that by the end of the class for their final drawing they were sitting near a gravel Museum service road, furiously sketching the reedy flowers that line it on either side while Monika and I watched on.

I always get sad when people leave this class early, because they miss the final fifteen minutes when each child gets to share what they made. Many are shy at first, like Coby today who scampered away in the middle of circle time to get some reassurance from his mom, then came back to share the beautiful drawing he had done of Linwood house, with the multicolored slate roof and unpolished marble walls drawn to perfection. Evan had done a similar drawing of the house, then a closer one with just that marble wall and a bench and flowers, and a final one--so creative!--of a giant red flower, as if he was hovering under it while sketching. He definitely got the whole "zooming in" part!

As people who work with kids often say, they have just about as much to teach us as we have to teach them. Today I learned that my pesky perfectionism might be getting in the way of my art, because these kids didn't need to know what a vanishing point was in order to make expressive drawings that gave the rest of us the visceral experience of focusing in on one delectable detail.