Art Class - Results

This is a very small town and I don't begrudge these old cats anything, but I have to say this: anyone with any amount of knowledge or power in or around this town lets it go straight to their heads. It's ridiculous.

Today, one of the locals who attended Art College in Boston back in The Day (like 35 years ago) literally took over the class. Thankfully, he had us doing some actual exercises; our regular instructor is a far better artist than teacher and he keeps teaching us the Very Basics (as you can see in the accompanying picture).

Today, we did gestures and blind contours - exercises I remember well - but there's just no way I can bring those to you. The 98 machine keeps running out of resources doing all of this, so I'm having to swap files between boxes constantly to resize, edit, watermark, etc. - just too much of a hassle and the work is too faint to show well.

At any rate, these are some the faces I did on February 21^st (last week), when we were learning faces. All I did electronically is move the images so they fit in a smaller area and change the paper's background color (which scanned a light blue) to white. I'm pretty sure it lost a few lines when I did that, but you get the gist of things.

But back to what I was saying:

I enjoy the class and all, but these people - everyone in Decatur County, TN - suck so hard, it's flatly unimaginable. You really would not believe this until you've experienced it for yourself.

While this cat droned on and on about what Art really is and how we should hold the pencil and all this "I love the sound of my voice and you should too, because I am very obviously An Authority Figure - listen to me! I am important!" shit, one of the little girls in the class stole a book I'd brought in to share with some of those little girls!

Several of them are into manga, so I brought in a couple of those "How to Draw Manga"-type books (I think these were "Superheroes" and "Superheroines") and damn if I didn't have to ask the entire class if someone had the other book! And everyone in the class knew who had the book, yet not one of them said a frigging word! I knew who had the book because I'd seen her with it earlier!

If she weren't trying to thieve it, she would have simply said, "Oh, I thought we could borrow them; I have it." Because the regular instructor has told us several times that we can take home any of the books he brings in. I certainly wouldn't have minded - I'd have been happy to let her take it home, so long as she brought it back when she was done! - but she was looking to steal it.

So I get home and got into The Art Box because I was looking for my charcoal crayons - I bought a whole pack a while back - and couldn't find them. Then it occurred to me I had taken them up there a few weeks back to share with the class... and someone obviously stole the entire box right out of my bag!

Decatur County, TN is filled with nothing but thieves, liars, drug addicts, corrupt cops, and just awful people. And no one bothers to call them on it because they're all just like them! It's a sociological issue and the only way to solve it is to burn the whole place to the gro... to start teaching the children how to behave properly - instill in them the morals and conduct that should have been instilled in their hillbilly parents, and...

Oh, why bother.

© C Harris Lynn, 2009