oh yeah

Oh yeah, art class last night.

I think I’m sort of ambivilent about the art class I’m taking. It’s a beginning drawing class, but what it’s seemed to me to be is an overview of different styles, without any real focus on how to do it for more than 90 minutes or 2 hours. Last night we did pen and ink drawings and ink washes. Now, I like ink drawings; one of my favorite of my drawings that I did before I stopped drawing was done in ink, but that was with an ink pen, and we were using calligraphy pens last night, which I found… difficult. I might be able to learn to work with them, but we did this for, well, 90 minutes, and then we did stippling and other stuff which is not much like . . .

Well, it’s not like gaining any kind of proficiency with one tool, which is, I guess, what I expect from a drawing class. What we’re getting is ‘lots of different ways and tools you can draw with’, and that’s very _interesting_, but it doesn’t seem basic enough to me. I have the impression from other people in the class that they feel the same way; I suspect that the problem is that the teacher, who knows all this stuff, has gone beyond the point where actually explaining it and practicing it diligently seems useful to her.

She feels that once a person has completed her beginning drawing class, they’re ready to go on to her intermediate drawing class. Well, okay, that’s probably true. They’re probably ready to go on to /her/ intermediate drawing class. I’m not sure I’d buy that they’d be ready to go on to a generic intermediate drawing class.

Anyway. I sent in an application to UAA for their BA in art for this fall. It looks from their schedules like they’ve got beginning art courses of one sort and another in evenings, so I might be able to swing a semester of that before having to negotiate weird work hours with my boss. The nice thing is I’ve got a degree from the UA system already, so I wouldn’t have to do most of the generalized stuff.

The other thing is, see, that I really don’t want to go to UAA for my MFA. I really, really want to go to Mills. Or Brown, or UW, or; you see my point. And an art degree is one of many that I’d like to have, and I don’t mind racking up undergrad degrees from the state system. I’d just like to get outside of that for an MFA.

So! Perhaps there will be art schooling for me in the fall. :)