Half the fun of going to an art gallery is listening to the people around you talk about what they’re seeing.
Everyone has their own unique take on art, just as people always tell a story in their own distinct way. It’s one of the first things you learn as a reporter or writer. The old cliché about two sides to every story is true, but one often finds there’s actually a story for every person involved and those on the periphery as well. And once it’s published, the readers have their take too.
So when I learned a new word at art class this week—”chiaroscuro”—it wasn’t exactly unexpected that everyone steeped the concept differently.
Chiaroscuro is an Italian word meaning light to dark or extreme light, or coming out of the dark—again, depending on your viewpoint—and it’s a pretty apt descriptor of the value exercises we were doing, looking at how the lights on the ceiling changed the shaped areas on our pages.
For our first exercise, we used willow charcoal to colour a page entirely black, then stripped away the colour with these strange malleable erasers that fold and tear and roll into balls as they self-clean.
As someone who seems to draw 50 per cent with the eraser anyway, this was naturally A-OK with me. Frankly, I found not having to get the shapes right the first time with a thin little pencil pretty freeing, though it didn’t seem many shared this viewpoint.
We then tried a little of the reverse. Using white charcoal, or white conté, on black paper, we began drawing our hands by focusing on the light aspects, leaving the shadows untouched so the naked dark paper shone through. Again, I would have to say things were becoming clearer for me. Mashing my white muck onto the page layer by layer I was pretty impressed with how relaxing it was and how much easier drawing is when you just throw something down and then start to shape it.
My art teacher, Rena Warren, calls this the “push and pull” and this is kind of how we write. In journalism school, they would often tell us, if you don’t know something, skip it, keep going and find that fact or word at the end. The point was always to get it out fast and worry about fine tuning small details later.
When you write three stories a day, possibly talking to a dozen or more people, this is really the only way to get everything done. One can’t get mired in the fine print, even if it does lead to mortifying consequences from time to time.
And that’s what kidnapped my mind mid-art lesson this week. Stripping and adding and pushing and pulling charcoal around a notebook, all of a sudden, I though: “What if this weirdo job is warping my brain?”
There’s a word for this. It’s: “OMG.” And yes, texting has skewed our vocabulary.
Looking back on how I used to draw in grade school, I can remember I was always very detail oriented, spending hours on small portions of an image.
A big part of our adult life is about finding ways to multi-task, though, and getting more into the day than really ought to be possible is a habit of mine. In fact, I think learning to cut corners is really a way of life for most of us. Like buying the ugly wrinkle-free pants. A compromise on appealing looks, sure, but one just might make it to work on time, on dress code, and, frankly, in a manner which might save useless small talk. No one talks to the girl in the ugly pants, right?
Yet, to think that one’s lifestyle choices could somehow influence something so basic as drawing a box on a page was really quite astounding.
And then I heard one classmate exclaim: “The shadows really do look different from different angles. I never noticed that before.”
While it might seem obvious that shapes and shadows look different from different positions, somehow when you become very focused on your own task these seemingly logical details start to evaporate. It was the perfect icebreaker for a mind seriously sweating the small stuff…or rather the idea that my drawings are no longer small and finely detailed because I’ve over-scheduled my life.
So it seems one can learn more from a drawing class than how to put accurate or semi-accurate lines on a page. And that’s made me wonder a little about painting and pastels too. There is a wide variety of classes on offer at the Kelowna Art Gallery and well worth checking out.
On a side note, the teacher corralling all of these artistic discoveries is having a show. This Friday, Feb. 10 Warren will hold an opening at the Streaming Café on Leon Avenue from 6:30 to 9 p.m. Stop by the café this month to check it out. The opening is free.
Jennifer Smith is a reporter and columnist for the Capital News covering arts and culture. She is taking an art class at the Kelowna Art Gallery and documenting the experience in a series entitle: Draw the Line.
