NOCCA pt4
Monday, July 18, 2005
It's about time for me to get back to the NOCCA story, I think.The way it worked was that we'd get there at 8 in the morning (Mr. Gross was a real fascist about tardiness, too) and we'd all meet in the main art room where they'd take attendance and talk about the day's agenda. This generally didn't last too long and by about 8:20 we'd break up into groups and each of the three groups would go with one of the instructors. I don't know how it happened, or how the groups were formed, but I remember that the our little clique always seemed to be mostly grouped together. It's kinda odd that, in a group of 28-30 kids, a clique even formed at all, but I'm fairly certain that ours was the only one.
So our groups would separate and go into different classrooms/studios for about an hour and a half. At ten we'd take a break, then finish out the morning with a different instructor. The day at NOCCA ended around 11:15 or 11:30, then we'd return to our "home schools" for the rest of the day. This basically put me getting back to McMain for 4th period which for me was Algebra 2. Generally speaking we'd all pile into Liz's Mitsubishi Eclipse or Otis' "French Mobile" (which I think was actually a Datsun, but some of those old Datsuns looked like little Fiats and Renaults) and head back to McMain. But lets look at this objectively: if you have a car full of 15 and 16 year olds in transit, there's a pretty good chance that it's not going to make it to its intended destination. I missed more algebra 2 than any other class in high school. (With the one possible exception being when I was supposed to sit in the Latin 1 class senior year and complete the latin 2 correspondence course to fulfill my foreign language requirement. That lasted for about a week before I just started going to the library to hang out with little Liz Nguyen and Ms. Moinet. ) I skipped the last 2 1/2 weeks straight of algebra 2, showed up for the exam, no questions asked, and got a C.
When the school year began we were given a set of supplies that included a 14" x 17" pad of smooth-finish bristol board (heavy-weight paper), a set of thick-lead Prismacolor colored pencils, a plastic pen and a few nibs (I can't believe I just recalled the word "nibs" and used it correctly), and a bottle of pelikan ink. Every week we were given an assignment, due first thing the next monday morning and the week started with critiques. We'd mount our drawings on the wall and sit around and discuss each piece. Someone would be chosen at random to go first in choosing a piece to talk about (other than your own, though I don't think that was an actual rule) and when your piece was chosen, you chose next. I still feel like these critiques were one of the best learning experience I've ever had. The critiques were honest and sometimes tough; if you brought in crap they knew it and said so. They weren't overly critical of lack of talent, but lack of effort was definitely bad form.
At the time NOCCA was in an old school building in uptown New Orleans and every so often we got to experience the benefit of our location. There were numerous times when we'd go outside with pads and pencils and sketch in the backyard, or we'd go for walks around the neighborhood. I can remember one walk to Audubon Park during which we stopped to discuss the pattern of bricks in an old brick wall. ("They just don't make 'em like they used to.") We also had the benefit of a nice place to hang out while we skipped fourth period.
I'm trying to recall things from that first year of NOCCA that stand out and define the experience, but there isn't a lot that stands out from the rest. I can remember our knot tying tests, in which we were graded on the knots Mr. Gross had taught us as a matter of practicality, and our subsequent use of those knots tying loose tree branches into bundles, tied to the pipes on the ceiling of the basement. It was a monday morning, I think, and Otis showed us his drawing that he'd done while he was on acid that weekend. I remember doing the pointalism oyster shells in the basement studio; the few photography classes we had with the teacher whose breath reeked of coffee; the day we did blind contour drawing, which I thought was ludicrous; the times Mr. Gross left us in the computer lab upstairs to just figure the macs out on our own; Mr. Gross imitating the pose of the army figure in my drawing during our first Monday morning critique; the time I illustrated the first few lines of a Tear Garden song and suggested that Purple-hair Liz might be familiar with the song, only to be met with a blank look; there was one day when we went outside to draw and there happened to be a karmann ghia parked next to the yard that I sat and drew; . . .
There. Stream of consciousness art school memories.
Another thing that we got in our supplies was a small "art journal," a hard-cover bound book of blank white pages. Every so often they would collect our journals to thumb through and comment on, and perhaps even grade, I can't remember. We didn't have assignments to do in our journals, they just wanted us to use them. Fair enough. I remember going through this thought process where I decided that I was going to learn to do portraits because, I figured, if I could draw faces convincingly, I could pretty much draw anything. I may even have been right-- doing portraits is hard, especially teaching yourself to do it when you're 16. It's not a matter of the level of detail involved, a portrait doesn't necessarily have to be detailed. But it does have to be representational of the subject. It has to look like them or it's just not a good portrait. There are definitely tricks to learn like not drawing the lines in between teeth, or drawing hair in clumps, not strands... But really what it comes down to is capturing a likeness and the slightest thing can throw the whole portrait off. I remember thinking that my instructors would be so impressed with my new abilities... As it turned out, I never did get any feedback from them about it.
We finished the year off with a student exhibition in which we were allowed to submit anything, assignments or personal work, so I decided to show a portrait I had done of my then girlfriend. It wasn't a cheesy senior picture type thing, it was more of a larger drawing with her in it, though she was obviously the main subject. Actually, there was anther drawing similar to it as well, both 18 x 24", done in colored pencil. Not light-sketch colored pencil, either. This was thick, 100% opacity, sharpen the pencil every half-minute, lay it on till it looks like oil pastels colored pencil drawing. It's slow, tedious, and difficult. But the Grosses decided that they were not going to show those two pieces.. I might've understood had they said "look, they're fine drawings but they're not in line with what the show is about..." or something, but they never said anything to me. They just left them out without explanation. It left me feeling betrayed.
Previous NOCCA entry
Continue with part 5 ->
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