Portrait of The Artist As A Scared Drawing Student

Arun at Cre8iveIgnition has a post for those among us who think they cannot draw and paint.

I am one of them.

Drawing, the dreaded subject as taught in elementary (and middle school, I think?), was a nightmare. I vividly recall the sense of panic that would creep up on me when Mrs Gupta, the art teacher, walked into class. She would ask us to get our pencils, brushes, paint-boxes and crayons ready. Soon, the little Rembrandts would be off, drawing a bright pink lotus flower or a brown hut, tucked between lime-green hills, with a winding driveway and a bright yellow sun.

We were supposed to get basic art education from that class. I think most of us only learnt about shame and encountered, for the first time, this concept of "failure". If your "bench-mate" scored a 90 and you scored just a pathetic 35, that was failure! Some of us - and I am a proud, card-carrying member of this group - figured out that drawing class was a good time for pranks and jokes. And because I studied in the Dark Ages when a teacher was not afraid of going medieval on one's ass, drawing lessons were torture. It was a class filled with rules and ridicule, comparison and criticism, failure and punishment. (Now would be a good time to remember Dickens.)

When I came to ninth standard, I learnt that biology labwork required drawing skills. But by this time, I was so sure I couldn't draw, my biology "journals" would always remain incomplete. Yes, I was the friendly, neighborhood kid forever looking for journals with tracing paper to finish those darned submissions. Then when I joined college, I was pretty sure electrical engineering wouldn't require *any* drawing skills. I was not quite right. With at least four courses in engineering graphics, it was back to tracing paper (and other advanced reprographics techniques such as "GT".)

Well, school and college came and went, I did not grow up to be a painter or a graphics artist, but I was - and still am - fascinated by visual arts. So a couple of years ago, I found the well-known Betty Edwards book in the public library and tried out some of the exercises. Just for shits and giggles, you know?

The results were shocking.

So they wouldn't hang me in the gallows of the Guggenheim, but these drawings weren't so bad as to merit a 35 out of 100. A 37 or a 38, maybe?

Now, this isn't about drawing or poor Mrs Gupta or some angry rejection of the Indian Education System As Conceived By the Overlords at CBSE. This is really about beliefs that we "know" are an integral and inherent part of our identities.

Don't we all know people who are, as Stephen Stills put it so eloquently during CSNY's Woodstock performance, "scared shitless" - of Mathematics, Sciences, Languages, whatever? Now I wonder, did all these people ever give themselves a second chance? Did they ever try to question their beliefs?