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My next breakthrough in figure-drawing
took place in fifth grade in Yonkers, New York. We had a drawing teacher
for a day, who taught us how to draw the human figure proportionately
by using the subject’s head as a measure. You measure one head length
from the chin to the chest, another head length from midchest to the waist,
another head length between shoulder and elbow, etc. By the 8th
grade I was back in Wallace, and my figures looked like the ones in this
drawing. I was very excited when it won a blue ribbon in an art contest.
The drawing however was more a product of wishful thinking on my part
than 'art'. I was the only Italian kid in this rural section of Indiana.
Unlike the little girl in the picture and most of my classmates, I had
short, curly hair, a roman nose and was already 5' 10" tall!
But wishful thinking or not,
perhaps having an uncle in New York who was an abstract painter and a
great-aunt in Indiana who was a scenery painter encouraged me to stick
to my drawing, because two years later, I took art classes at our brand
new consolidated county high school Fountain Central.
It was the first time art classes
were offered.
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Mrs. Fisher was a wonderful
art teacher. She taught us about one-point, two-point, and three-point
perspective and gave us experience in a variety of mediums such as silk-screening,
copper-tooling, water-color, oil and tempera painting. But what I really
wanted to do was to draw and paint people.
My high school started using
my drawing skills in various ways – I sketched the front of a southern
mansion that was built to scale against a gym wall for our Junior-Senior
Prom 'Southern Splendor,' but the final outcome had far more to do with
the shop people’s talents than with mine! My senior year was quite busy
as I took on the responsibility of being co-editor for the Fountain Central
Yearbook. Our sponsor, Miss Lucille Thomas, was very ambitious and wanted
our yearbook to place in state competition. So she sent my classmate Trena
Ward and me to Ball State Yearbook Training Workshop the summer before.
But even with yearbook editing duties, I drew cartoons for the Pony Express
student newspaper. I even drew the senior float for the Homecoming game
- the Turkey Run Warriors against the Fountain Central Mustangs.
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On my trip down to Bob Jones
University to start my freshman year, my family took me through Gatlinburg
in the Smokies. I was fascinated by the sidewalk artists who drew portraits
of people with charcoal and chalk. Even though I did not intend to major
in art, I decided to take a portrait class at Bob Jones. The art faculty
had a different opinion on the matter. They informed me that I would first
have to take two semesters of drawing and a semester of design before
I could take their portrait class, which was for art majors anyway!
So I grudgingly signed up for
drawing. It was a three hour class that first semester. The very first
day professor Darryl Koontz stuck us in a little room and set a plain
wooden chair down in front of us.
"Draw it," he instructed.
"Don't draw the concept of a chair that you have in your mind. I
want you to look at this chair and draw what you see."
Then he left us. For three
hours. It took three hours to draw the chair. In fact I didn't finish!
As the semester progressed we gradually moved from line drawings to shading
and textures - metal, wood, glass, and cloth. And for some reason I always
had trouble getting my pictures done, as you can see. Struggling to do
my very best work, I often had trouble distinguishing the forest from
the trees.
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The second semester drawing
class was more fun. We drew people. Professor Blair taught us a technique
called contour drawing. Basically you don’t look down at your paper as
you draw - except when you need to lift your pencil off the page to relocate
it. It's sort of like not looking at the keyboard when you type. You let
your hand follow your eye movement as you look at your subject – and your
hand naturally records what your eye actually sees. When you finally get
relaxed and coordinated, that is. Here's a comparison of my figure drawing
before and after I took Mr. Blair's class.
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Okay, by now you realize a
great artist I’m not! But you can also see that a passable artist many
of us can be with the right opportunity and training. I finished the second
semester of drawing and never got around to taking the portrait class,
because by then I was taking an 18/20 hour course load including voice
lessons and piano, and struggling to pass my sophomore speech platform
so that I could be admitted into BJU’s Speech Program.
I went on to use my drawing
skills a little after college, especially right afterwards when I worked
at Teen Haven, Christian Youth Ministries in Philadelphia, PA. Teen Haven
staff developed their own instructional materials for weekly Bible Studies,
tutorials, and five-day clubs in the summertime.
Here is a poster that features
a live-in teenager whom I dearly loved at our center at 20th
and Poplar. He was so beautiful and he was facing down so many odds -
alcoholism and drug dealing in his family and an absent father. I just
wanted to give him hope and this was the only way I knew how.
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