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I FOUND THE ROOM, HESITATED, knocked politely, and went in. Everyone looked up from their drawing pads. I felt like a big blundering interruption.
“Hi,” said the tutor guy, “you must be Jamie.”
“Yeah, uh, sorry I’m late. I had to play soccer. Look, if it’s too late...?”
“Well..,” he said thoughtfully, “..no, it’s never too late. You’ve missed the intro, that's all, and a couple of warm-ups, but if you want to hang in here and try and pick it up...?”
“Yes! Of course!” It burst out of me.
“Right then! Here’s your kit. What we’re doing is a series of quick sketches, just of this group of objects here,” he pointed to the low table in the middle of the room. There were about five things on there, a milk carton, a ball, a box, a big roll of packaging tape and a tall empty glass jar. For a moment I felt a pang of despair. I’d bust my gut, lied and schemed, invaded my parent’s bedroom repeatedly, and raided my bank account in secret, just to come and draw some junk!
Then I saw what the others were doing. Their drawings were amazing! Weird! Spooky! I wanted to be here!
“...but we’re not going for a photographic rendering,” continued the tutor, “I want you to experiment. Try a different medium each time. And go for the form of the objects. Capture the impression you get. Try and strike a different mood each time!” He looked around, glanced at his watch, and said, “Change!” Suddenly everyone got up and changed their seats. The tutor quickly rearranged the objects and everyone got going again on a clean page. I joined in, choosing a blood red pastel to start with. I was banging down blocks of tone, quick and angry. I added some black, dramatically deepening the shadows I was seeing. At the last moment, seconds before “Change” I added some sharp burnt-yellow as a kind of flare across the background.
Brian glanced at it as I shifted to a new angle. “Mmmm!!” he said. That was all, but it made me feel great!
I flipped the page and started again, continuing with the yellow straight off. I got this most amazing subtle effect. I added a touch of green, but that got the whole picture looking too cool. I added some orange, hard against the green.
“Change.”
Off I went again. I was really loving the power of the pastels, how I could lay it on thickly, or just brush it lightly, getting subtle mood-effects. This was living! Brian came by right at the change and suggested (just suggested, mind, he didn’t tell me) that I might like to try paint. I got myself reset, which took a bit of time, and began painting. I thought I’d made a real balls-up of my first one but he came back and said, “Yes! You’re really getting the form there! Don’t worry about controlling the paint too much. Let it mix, let it dribble! Let the paint be itself!” I thought it sounded pretty corny, but I also knew what he meant. On the next change I really went for it, slopping it on, letting it dribble, even blowing at it in places to get a whole bunch of blood-dribble effects and swirly mixings.
Then Brian brought that one to an end. He cleared the objects off the table and said, “Right, we’ve got a big room here so lay out all your works, all of them, even if you think they stink.”
We did that, laying them out on the floor. Then he asked some of us to talk about our stuff. He asked me first! I’d never talked about my stuff before. I’d never even shown it to anyone, except at school where I could hardly not let people see it. So I waved my hands at my pictures and said something like, “Aw, well and in this one I used yellow first, and then I added the green, and then the orange...” and he interrupted me and said, “Jamie, I see anger.”
“Huh?”
“In all this work, I see anger. Would that be true?”
“Er...” I was thinking about it, thinking real deep. No-one had ever said anything remotely like that about anything I’d ever done before. “...er, yeah, I guess it is, a bit.”
“A bit!” he said, “man, this stuff’s really powerful! This really speaks to me!”
I didn’t know what to say. I just stood there, feeling really incredibly amazing. Then I had to take out my hanky and wipe some tears out of my eyes. “Thanks,” I murmured, not looking up at anyone, “thanks for saying.”
#
I GOT THROUGH THE REST of the morning feeling really shaky inside. We did some other stuff with words. First he showed us some slides, starting off with these awesome images from those old bibles; y’know, the ones that some medieval monk had spent years just doing one page. Then he went through all these other things, posters from the twenties and thirties, and stuff from communist Russia from about fifty years ago, then lots of modern advertising. He talked about each slide and I was amazed at how enthusiastic he was about them all, and that there were so many different styles and moods and messages and all that. I was amazed, thrilled. I was so glad I was there!
And I was still feeling all shaky inside. Brian noticed, I was sure, and yet all he did was give me a sort of a look now and then which let me know that he knew I was all stirred up, and that it was okay.
I felt like I was home, for the first time in my life.
#
WE DID THE WORD-THING next. He asked us to think of a ‘powerful word’, like FIRE or FREEZE, or IMPACT or IMPULSE. I chose ROARING. We did a ‘free-association’ exercise first, coming up with all these side-words, ICE, FLAME, CRATER, CRAZY. For my word I got WIND, TRAFFIC, WATERFALL, LION, BEAST, RAGE, MONSTER, WAVES, CROWD, VOICE. Then at the last moment, as a complete surprise: FATHER.
We started drawing, sketching out the word over and over again, trying to ‘Make the Essence Visible’, as Brian put it. I tried getting the lettering into the shape of an open lion’s mouth, but it just didn’t work. It looked dumb. So I ditched that and ended up with a big swelling word with thick, slightly rounded block lettering. I added movement lines, and a sort of echo effect coming up behind it.
Then, believe it or not, Brian went off and made us ten photocopies each of our work. “Now, put on the colour!” he said, “Be bold! Don’t think too much, just wham it on! Do twenty of them, I don’t care! The photocopier’s still on! Go for it!”
I set to. He came by five minutes later and glanced at my two hesitant efforts. He leaned in close, “C’mon, Jamie!” he said, gripping my shoulders and giving them a quick massage, “Rip into it! I know you can do it!” I nearly cried again.
I got up and went back in the room to look at my first exercise, still laid out on the floor, then went back to ROARING. I whumped on the colours. I wham-bammed it. Six of them, seven, eight-nil, and still going! I was happy, really really happy.
After that we had lunch. The other tutor, Melissa, had been quietly bringing it in for some time. We could all smell it, but she had it all covered. Brian called a stop and we all got up, hungry. It was nearly half-past one. Melissa took off the covers with a flourish. “Eat My Art!” she said dramatically, and stood back.
The food looked amazing! We just stood there admiring it. Everything was arranged in patterns of colour and texture, and some of it was sort of sculptured and structured as well. In the middle was a huge cake done to look like an old-fashioned painting with a big carved frame.
One of the girls in the class said, “I can’t eat that! It’s all too good!”
Melissa pulled a sandwich off its tower, “Art is Transformation,” she said, “Make the Eating the Art, and make an Art of Eating.” She flew the sandwich like a little delta-winged plane into my mouth. Then she laughed, like everything she had been saying was just a load of bull. I liked her at once.
So we made an art of our eating, and talked about the food and made corny jokes about it too, and then she asked someone to cut the cake and it turned out to actually be all made of some sort of plastic, but it looked so much like food! Melissa laughed and laughed and pulled out a real cake she had hidden nearby, and we drank instant coffee out of Brian’s own hand-made cups and talked more and then suddenly we were back into the workshop.
Straight after lunch Brain got us altogether into a big circle and asked me to introduce myself and tell them all what I liked doing most and what I hoped to do with my art in the future. Apparently they’d all done it at the beginning. It was a pretty scary thing to do but I plucked up the courage to speak, “Well, uh, I’m Jamie Wigram and ah.., well what I like doing is mainly sketching, like portraits I guess you call them, mainly from memory, I’ve worked with pencil, mostly, but I want to get into other mediums now.., ah, in the future I think I’d like to be a graphic artist for a magazine or something, and maybe do portraits too, or cart- , sorry, caricatures. That sort of stuff.”
They all nodded and smiled.
That was all. No sneering, no eye-rolling, no snorts of disbelief. Just acceptance. I was in heaven.
#
MELISSA’S PROGRAMME ran a bit late. It was five when we finished, though I wasn’t really thinking about the time. Then I had to sort out the money thing with Brian, then I grabbed Melissa and asked her if she would take a quick look over the sketches I’d brought with me. She said they were good, but that I could do with getting to some more life-drawing classes, and had I done many?
“No.” I admitted. She told me about several she knew of, and also suggested I just ask someone to sit for me.
“Sit?”
“So you can draw them. Members of your family, for instance. Now, look at the time! We’ve got to get this place locked up.”
One minute later I was out on the street. It was sunset. I began freaking about the time, and rushed to the nearest bus stop. I didn’t know the timetable, and some vandal had ripped the printed one from the pole. I waited and waited. It got darker and darker. Finally a bus came. I scrambled on, clutching all my work from the workshop and spreading paint over my jeans as I got into a seat. The trip seemed to take forever. At the other end I was off and running, as if I was going to make up the missing few hours in my fake afternoon. I stuffed my artworks under the house and sped in the back door. Luckily I encountered mum first.
“Jamie! Where the hell have you been!” she cried, sounding quite freaked out.
“Sorry!” I puffed, “Sorry! We went out to this track place with the cars and it took ages to get back and then I missed the bus because we had to go back to Tem’s place for my bag and...”
She was looking at me, sort of level and serious and sad too. I stopped. I was beginning to wonder if someone had died or something. She shook her head and said, with this crumpled up face like she was going to cry, “Jamie, don’t lie to me, and for heaven’s sake don’t lie to your father. What was this ‘art thing’ you were at?”
“Huh?!” I was just so gob-smacked that she had found out about it that I went completely silent.
“Well?”
Still I hesitated. Then slowly I put down my bag and opened it up and took out the brochure that had gotten mud on it from my soccer boots and I passed it over to her. “It was really good,” I said quietly, “really good.” I was still puffing from my run. As my heart started to slow down I started to think a bit better, and then I became afraid.
“Where’s Dad?” I asked anxiously. I was staring to glance around, half expecting him to come springing out from behind a door, roaring.
“He’s out looking for you,” she said, “We had no idea where you were! No idea! When you didn’t phone up like you said you would, I rang your coach...”
“Tony.”
“Yes, and he gave me a phone list, and I called that boy’s mother...”
“Tem.”
“Yes, and she didn’t know anything about you, so we decided then that you’d been picked up by some creep!” Suddenly she got real angry, “Oh, Jamie! How could you do this to us!?”
Right about then I heard the car coming up the drive and my heart sank. Dad was going to kill me.