Making a Start with Art
It’s interesting and rather sad that some of us humans are so critical of our own creative abilities. Somehow, having fun with just ‘having a go’ can become the source of gut-wrenching anxiety. This is certainly how I felt starting a new art class with Learning Pembrokeshire in Fishguard recently.
The first week Michaela Hollyfield, herself an established artist (we have had articles about her here on Pembrokeshire.Online), made us welcome and set us to work with a drawing exercise that involved not actually looking at the paper and not allowing the pencil to leave the page. Challenging and yet freeing. We moved on to drawing using different pencils.
I know pencils come in different thicknesses and density but using a pencil for drawing is not a skill I have mastered. The homework of drawing a landscape was therefore a real challenge, and I admit I left it to the last minute, turning up for the class with a five-minute piece that was taken from a holiday photograph.
Our second session showed that many of us are feeling the anxiety of trying something new and although looking around me I could see that my fellow students are making rather wonderful images, most of us don’t think anything we make is any good.
What a great bunch of people, though, and with Michaela’s light-hearted and hands-on approach we are soon covering ourselves in charcoal. Well, maybe it’s just me who covered themselves. In retrospect, a lime-green jumper was not the best choice to wear while covering a piece of paper with a burnt stick.
The results, not all finished, seem impressive to me.
After we had all cleaned up, Michaela showed us how to stretch watercolour paper so next time we could begin some watercolour painting. Everyone took turns to soak and stretch the paper, sticking it onto a board with tape, the idea being that the paper will dry flat and with the fibres stretched so it won’t wrinkle when we begin to paint.
So far, so good. I feel challenged and not a little anxious about stepping outside my comfort zone, but looking forward to when we meet up again and start to work with colour.
