Mailart 365 has moved

I was having a shitty day yesterday. In the morning, a mailart show I had planned for months fell to pieces and then everything went wrong at work as well.

By the time I got to my art class in the evening, I was tired, frustrated and completely not in the mood to draw

However, I had signed up for it, and I was determined to learn and to conquer my childhood fear of drawing and art teachers.

It didn't go well.

The task was to draw a large piece of scrunched up white paper and scrunched up piece of black paper, laid out on a black and white background using charcoal.

This is exactly the sort of task that put me off art classes at school.

I tried to draw it and after an hour, I had made a huge amount of mess. It looked shit. Worse than that though, it felt shit. There was nothing on the paper that felt like the thing in front of me.

The problem is this. I'm hyperactive and when I look at a piece, I don't really take it in visually, I sense it in my mind.

Even when we were asked to look at other peoples artworks, I didn't feel that anyone had made something I could feel. They all felt too soft, or hard for me.

The longer I stared at the scene, the more frustrated I became, until the art teacher could clearly see I was agitated and upset. She asked me what I wanted to do, and I said I wanted to tear the damn thing up and collage it or do something that would make it feel right.

"Go ahead" she said. So I went to the shelves and got a craft knife out. Where I saw black I scrawled hard and deep with the charcoal and where I saw white I ripped and gouged with white. White had to jump out of the page, black had to be deep and recessed.

I was a blur, a haze of activity. Of course my canvas was in shreads and everyone was polite about my piece. It didn't look right to anyone. But it felt right to me, and I felt very defensive of it. I must have looked like a right whacko.

It was a pretty traumatic experience, and in all honesty, it made me hate drawing again.

However, on the way out, one of the other students walked alongside me and said, out of earshot of the teacher

"Thanks for doing that. I couldn't get anything out of that, and I really felt that your work summed up what I was feeling. It was great"

I hadn't meant to make an abstract piece, and this piece wasn't a statement of frustration. It was a reflection of what I felt was in front of me. Bloody awful for a drawing class though.

So, yeah my drawing class isn't going well. Perhaps drawing isn't for me