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Art, like morality, consists in drawing the line somewhere. --Gilbert K. Chesterton |
Thursday, March 18, 1999 Another Exhausted Thursday, Part I Scheduled for Thursday was the following:
Before class: Go to the bank.
Needless to say, none of my homework and stuff was done as of Wednesday night. So I stayed up 'round the clock working on all of it. The lion's share of my time was spend painting a chair; or rather, using a chair to divide the space on my illustration board in an esthetically pleasing manner. I was surprised to note that, by the time I got done, I had painted what was recognizably a metal folding chair. So that much was good. On the other hand, the negative space did nothing; I had clearly painted a chair on a light grey background, and the background has only background. I had an idea of how that could be fixed, but it would have involved a lot more painting, and I was tired, and my back hurt, because I was painting on the floor, because I only have one chair. So I left it, and went on to my other assignments.
There comes a point, when you've been up all night, when everything takes half of eternity to accomplish. But you don't account for that in your planning. So you think you have plenty of time before you have class -- which would would, under normal circumstances -- but you've forgotten to factor in the half-hour it's going to take you to tie the laces on your sneakers. I'm exaggerating slightly, above, but the idea is the important thing. This is how I ended up arriving at my English class a half-hour late, despite having been up all night. Nor did I make it to the bank beforehand. I did, however, manage to finish my English homework, and my column for the college paper, although the latter didn't turn out very well at all.
It would have been nice had I remembered to bring my English homework with me to college. Ditto for the diskette with my column for the paper. At least I remembered my art homework. Not to worry, however, as I spoke to my English professor, and told him I'd bring the homework by at the end of the day. And the new Opinions Editor, who's in English 399 with me, told me that she had enough material for the section this week anyway, so I could just resume the column next week.
So. From there, after dropping off my stuff in my art classroom and quickly swinging by the English Department offices, to a poetry reading in the Student Union, run by the English Club. It was called for 12:45 PM, got started around 1:00, and ended around 1:30, I think. We ended up with... I dunno, twentysomething people in attendance? Give or take a few. The professor whose first novel I'm supposed to be proofreading was the featured speaker, and he read a chapter from his second novel, which he's busily polishing just now, and which I think I've heard or read about half of at this point. I'm looking forward to reading the whole thing once it's done. About five other people read stuff afterwards, myself included. Despite the fact that I was on the verge of collapsing in exhaustion, I managed to make it through reading a poem I wrote last year about one of my sisters and my relationship with her. (Actually, said exhaustion may have helped my reading, as I suspect it had the effect of slowing me down.) It was pretty well received.
From there, tailed a friend to the Writing Skills Workshop, where she works -- discussing along the way the issue of whether I should explain the whole "stalking" thing in this journal; she thinks I might as well -- after which I went to my art class. And then realized I needed some more supplies, so I zoomed over to the bookstore, bought 'em, and zoomed back to class, just in time. To make a long story short, my homework may have been something of a failure (as the background really didn't do anything), it was, at least, an interesting failure. The chair was awfully comfortable in the space it was in (which was due in some measure to planning on my part), and sort of suggested an entire scene just by being there. So it wasn't a complete loss. Not at all. During class itself, we were told to direct our attention to one side of the room, which had some long windows covered by blinds, a staircase, a blackboard, and lots of other interesting stuff. We were to take any part of that and paint it. True to form, I went for an extreme close-up of one particular corner. It's the sort of really simple work I could actually recreate in Paintbrush given enough time and interest, both of which I lack just now. A couple of lines, a triangle, and a trapezoid, really. My professor immediately identified the exact spot I'd painted, and granted that it was a good start, but wanted some more stuff in there. More shades of grey; more background details that I had ignored for the sake of ease, elegance, and simplicity. I had a couple of problems with this. For one thing, I had, for the first time all semester, forgotten my glasses. (Because, for the first time all semester, I had needed them at home, to do my art homework.) This made it hard for me to properly see all of that background detail in the first place. Also, I'm nowhere near as confident as my professor is in my ability to get more complicated and still produce something that looks good. Anyway, I continued painting and painting, darkening the background, and trying to produce really straight lines, using strips of newspaper to mask parts of it, and fussing with one of the borders, repainting it about four times, and mixing paints to produce the exact shades I wanted, and, well, continuing until every damn inch of my illustration board was covered with at least five coats of acrylics. As an aside, the tube of white paint that was supposed to last me for the rest of the semester is now more than halfway done. I'm going to need to buy more of the stuff.
Anyway, class wound down, and I ran out of steam. I showed the professor the final product (without any added shades of gray in the background; I'd tried, briefly, but then painted over them, 'cause I couldn't get them to work), saying that I'd just as soon leave it as-is, actually. He nodded, and granted that my final product looked pretty good. He still felt that, had I followed his advice, I would have produced something that would have been interesting in a different sort of way, that would've been more towards what he liked. Still, he was gratified to note that I was willing to stick to my guns and follow my muse, even though it was going to lower my grade. He then got very serious and said, "You do realize that this is going to lower your grade. Because I am a vengeful professor. And I don't like being ignored." Or something to that effect, with a slightly Biblical tinge to it. And I gulped, and nodded. I may try to rework this before the end of the semester. We'll see.
There's more, but this is long enough, and long overdue, so I'll just continue today's events in tomorrow's entry.
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