Garbage
By Patty Somlo
April 15, 2024
April 15, 2024
This morning Phil is having us do a garbage drawing. The assignment seems fitting on such a miserable day. Every couple of minutes the wind flings blankets of rain against the studio’s floor to ceiling windows. Enough water has collected to send puddles across the pavement, building into a river that’s migrating down the street.
We’re to use the garbage drawing for acting out our craziest impulses. A wild impulse we might consider, Phil says, is sticking charcoal up our noses and exhaling onto the page. On one level he’s kidding; but on another level, he’s not. Throughout this class, he’s been teaching us how to act like artists.
We draw for a time on a large sheet of white paper. Then we pick up a second sheet and try what we wouldn’t dare on the first one. In the next hour, Phil wants us to alternate between careful detailing of what we see to crazy experimentation.
At the end of each class, Phil asks us to hang our drawings on the thumb-tacked studded walls, and he draws our attention to interesting aspects of every one. Today, we’re going to treat the garbage drawings differently. “No one has to see it,” he promises, before stepping over to the ledge and turning up the volume on the boom box that’s splattered with old glue, and green, yellow and blue paint.
I hear the first funky beats of James Brown’s Papa’s Got a Brand New Bag and tap my foot, slashing lines across the page with a thick graphite stick. My torso sways in time with my hand.
My model is two-dimensional – a black and white drawing of a young man in a plaid cap. I alternate between loose pale graphite lines on the garbage drawing and black shadows I layer in charcoal on the serious work. No matter what Phil says, I keep fiddling with the serious piece. I’m bothered that it doesn’t look like the drawing I’m copying. The eyes are not the same size. The left eye sits higher on the face than the right.
I’ve made good headway on the lips, though, using an eraser to clean up places where the light slices across. After about an hour, I see the light places create the impression of fullness in the lips. The nose, of course, is impossible, the bottom in the original drawing not a bulb, as mine has become. The original artist’s rendering of the nose is elegant and refined, the nostrils seed-like and small.
To please Phil, as I know he’s passing behind me to check what I’ve done, I set the serious drawing down on the paint-smudged Douglas fir floor and lift the garbage drawing up to my board. I make short, slashed lines for the right eye, as I wave my hand to the rhythm of the tenor sax. Through the vertical I add horizontal lines, so the eye resembles a hand-made asterisk or star. I rub graphite with my index and third fingers around the cheek and add an ear, which I suddenly realize I forgot.
That’s when I notice the slant of light across the nose that extends to the space above the lip. I see the nose has formed a shadow, leaning precariously to the right. I go back to my first drawing to fix these places again.
Phil rattles on about art the entire two hours we’re here. It took the painter Willem DeKooning twenty years, Phil says, before he finished a canvas he liked. Phil reminds us that no one in the United States cares about art. That should give us the freedom, as he frequently exhorts us, to be like the people in France who wear no pants.
Like most of the students who gather here early on Saturday mornings, I studied art once in a serious way. On campus at the Northwest edge of Washington, D.C., I stared at slides of Renaissance and Byzantine art and the dark Dutch masters, wondering how I would remember enough to get at least a C. In studios with lots of light, I learned about form, composition and perspective, while sketching wine bottles and apples, roses and calla lilies, and the thin naked bodies of fellow students. I studied the color wheel and mixed paints.
Though I memorized dates, periods and styles, and covered canvases with colors, I never learned anything real about art. Instead, I accumulated piles of details. And I came to understand that the goal of making art was to sell.
I also came to believe that artists were formed by God with specially adapted fingers for wielding paintbrushes. I assumed no matter how hard I tried, I would never find my name among those passionate people who’d been born with the gift that transformed a nobody into an artist: Talent.
In every studio class I took, there were always students who had it with a capital T. Starting the first day of class, the teacher would gather us around their drawing pads to admire work the rest of us would never have the skill to match. If the class was taught by a figurative artist or a landscape painter, the special student’s work would be eerily lifelike. In one painting class where the teacher arrived every day with a purple satin cape draped over his shoulders, students who did the most outlandish work received the most praise.
The star students also seemed the loveliest. The girls were waifs, with thick untamed curls temporarily held back by purple silk scarves. They wore layers of leotard tops, flowing blouses and floor-length skirts pulled off thrift store racks and looked as if they’d stepped off a fashion runway.
The guys were equally stunning. Most left a dusting of stubble on their cheeks and chins. Their hair was tousled and thick, and they sported worn brown leather jackets with small, necessary rips.
My teachers flagrantly forgot my name. I worked in isolation, knowing I’d never merit a single word of praise.
Instead of learning the most intrinsic lesson about making art, that one needs to work steadily and consistently to improve, I took on my teachers’ beliefs, many of whom were artists who felt they’d failed. Like them, I assumed some had it and some didn’t, and I was one of the large uninspired group of humanity that didn’t.
Once I left school it didn’t take long to give up. The freedom I’d felt doodling outdoors or sketching quick portraits of my friends had been replaced by a tight timidity whenever I tried to work.
I had the sense that when a real artist stepped in front of the canvas, divine inspiration spilled from his hands. I stood in front of my easel and listened to the hum of the refrigerator, wondering what might be in there for me to eat.
The urge to make art came back to me slowly. I’d notice it coming on from time to time, mostly when I was outdoors. It would seize me like the desire for a fudgesicle or a vanilla malt, or the memory of a long-ago afternoon relaxing at the beach.
Decades after I’d given art up, the desire to paint and draw became especially strong. By then, I had taken to going on long walks, up and down the steep streets of San Francisco where I lived. As I climbed past the colorful Victorians in my neighborhood of Lower Pacific Heights to the mansions of Presidio Heights, the light before sunset would turn the white and pale-yellow stucco walls golden.
From my studio apartment, I hiked up and down hills, to the Financial District where I worked. On Nob Hill, I’d walk past old brick apartment buildings whose window boxes burst with blooms and the pink and purple butterfly wings of bougainvillea fluttered against the walls. I’d drop down Sacramento Street, stepping slowly because the incline heading toward Chinatown was nearly ninety degrees. I’d pass the sidewalk stands in Chinatown, with their stalks of deep green bok choy and beige onions and red peppers piled high. Old Chinese women would pass, in red and black silk padded jackets, their black pants stopping short of their ankles, and their feet clad in tiny blue and white Nikes.
One day, seeing San Francisco didn’t seem enough. I needed to experience the physical act of capturing what I saw.
The course description was upbeat, claiming everyone had the ability to draw. Drawing wasn’t, it went on, an innate gift, but a skill anyone could acquire. All one had to do was learn to use the right, intuitive side of the brain, instead of the left, analytical part.
The class was held in the Sharon Art Studio, located in Golden Gate Park. By this time, I had moved to a flat in the Richmond District, on a street that straddled the park. Each Saturday morning, I walked briskly over to the 25th Avenue entrance, on the north side. More often than not, the fog lay draped over the branches of the eucalyptus trees. I’d walk past the tall crane and stacks of metal and wood at the art museum construction site and keep going, until I passed the long green lawn spilling out below the fragile white Victorian Conservatory of Flowers. Here, plantings in clever patterns appeared each week, and the tourists piled off buses to snap photos. Then, I’d head over toward the children’s playground, next to which the Sharon Art Studio sat.
In the first room, men and women worked with clay. After passing the clay studio, I would enter a dark narrow hall, where drawings from the life class hung on both walls. My class met in the first room to the right.
Each week, we did exercises unlike anything I’d done as an art student. We held pictures upside down and drew what we saw, then flipped our work right-side up, amazed at its accuracy. We drew without looking at the page. We sketched furiously and fast.
Instead of the Darwinish art education I’d had when I was younger, this art training aimed at ensuring that we survived. Our teacher’s goal was not to weed out the smattering of students she deemed to have promise, but to make sure we all went on to draw.
And I did. Tentatively, at first. I was worried about repeating the negative experiences of the past. So, I took the beginning drawing class a second time.
Eventually, I did move on. The next class I took, a one-day workshop on the figure in paper and clay, helped my spirit soar. Running my fingers through the damp gray clay felt like swimming back into the womb. Losing myself in forming the figure with my hands, hours passed like a minute, making me feel as if I’d been reborn.
I am taking Phil’s Introduction to Drawing class for the third time. The studio where we meet sits on a busy street full of shops and restaurants in Southeast Portland, Oregon, where I live now. As I did in San Francisco, I walk to class. This time of year, the sidewalks are strewn with leaves -- red, bright yellow and brown.
They say the third time’s a charm and in my case it’s true. I’m finally beginning to understand art.
Art is garbage. It is, as Phil loves to remind us, committing to the monster. It’s crashing and burning, going down with the plane, because only out of the wreckage can we save ourselves. The world I enter when my fingers are black with charcoal and my torso sways in time with my hand is a soothing balm to the injuries the rest of life inflicts. The emphasis on the end product of art by my early teachers made me lose sight of this.
Art, after all, is the voice that cries out over and over again, I want to make. It’s returning to the days when playing with clay and coloring, or smearing paint and glue across a page, felt like the most fun thing a kid could do. It’s about going to a place where the rest of the world stops and all that exists is you and the charcoal and the page.
Phil says it takes three hundred figure drawings before you ever make a good one. At our last class, he shows us the video I’ve seen twice before, of Pablo Picasso painting. Every time I think Picasso is done, he covers the canvas in white paint and starts the painting over again.
After all these years, I am learning what Picasso must have known: Mistakes are what count. That’s what Phil means by committing to the monster. That’s the point of garbage.
The session is over, and our mad drawings taunt us from the walls of this room. Phil holds his hand above mine, like Dick Clark on American Bandstand, waiting to hear the rousing applause that will signal the winning couple. Every hand in the room goes up, except mine.
Phil walks over to where I’m standing, the heat in my face certain to have turned it a shocking shade of pink. Then he hands me the prize -- a tiny, black plastic gorilla.
“For courage,” he says and grins.
My fellow students have not raised their hands in recognition of my talent or for the exquisiteness of my technique. I have won this prize because I was willing to let go and have a ball. That, in the end, has made me feel that I have at last captured the starring role.
We’re to use the garbage drawing for acting out our craziest impulses. A wild impulse we might consider, Phil says, is sticking charcoal up our noses and exhaling onto the page. On one level he’s kidding; but on another level, he’s not. Throughout this class, he’s been teaching us how to act like artists.
We draw for a time on a large sheet of white paper. Then we pick up a second sheet and try what we wouldn’t dare on the first one. In the next hour, Phil wants us to alternate between careful detailing of what we see to crazy experimentation.
At the end of each class, Phil asks us to hang our drawings on the thumb-tacked studded walls, and he draws our attention to interesting aspects of every one. Today, we’re going to treat the garbage drawings differently. “No one has to see it,” he promises, before stepping over to the ledge and turning up the volume on the boom box that’s splattered with old glue, and green, yellow and blue paint.
I hear the first funky beats of James Brown’s Papa’s Got a Brand New Bag and tap my foot, slashing lines across the page with a thick graphite stick. My torso sways in time with my hand.
My model is two-dimensional – a black and white drawing of a young man in a plaid cap. I alternate between loose pale graphite lines on the garbage drawing and black shadows I layer in charcoal on the serious work. No matter what Phil says, I keep fiddling with the serious piece. I’m bothered that it doesn’t look like the drawing I’m copying. The eyes are not the same size. The left eye sits higher on the face than the right.
I’ve made good headway on the lips, though, using an eraser to clean up places where the light slices across. After about an hour, I see the light places create the impression of fullness in the lips. The nose, of course, is impossible, the bottom in the original drawing not a bulb, as mine has become. The original artist’s rendering of the nose is elegant and refined, the nostrils seed-like and small.
To please Phil, as I know he’s passing behind me to check what I’ve done, I set the serious drawing down on the paint-smudged Douglas fir floor and lift the garbage drawing up to my board. I make short, slashed lines for the right eye, as I wave my hand to the rhythm of the tenor sax. Through the vertical I add horizontal lines, so the eye resembles a hand-made asterisk or star. I rub graphite with my index and third fingers around the cheek and add an ear, which I suddenly realize I forgot.
That’s when I notice the slant of light across the nose that extends to the space above the lip. I see the nose has formed a shadow, leaning precariously to the right. I go back to my first drawing to fix these places again.
Phil rattles on about art the entire two hours we’re here. It took the painter Willem DeKooning twenty years, Phil says, before he finished a canvas he liked. Phil reminds us that no one in the United States cares about art. That should give us the freedom, as he frequently exhorts us, to be like the people in France who wear no pants.
Like most of the students who gather here early on Saturday mornings, I studied art once in a serious way. On campus at the Northwest edge of Washington, D.C., I stared at slides of Renaissance and Byzantine art and the dark Dutch masters, wondering how I would remember enough to get at least a C. In studios with lots of light, I learned about form, composition and perspective, while sketching wine bottles and apples, roses and calla lilies, and the thin naked bodies of fellow students. I studied the color wheel and mixed paints.
Though I memorized dates, periods and styles, and covered canvases with colors, I never learned anything real about art. Instead, I accumulated piles of details. And I came to understand that the goal of making art was to sell.
I also came to believe that artists were formed by God with specially adapted fingers for wielding paintbrushes. I assumed no matter how hard I tried, I would never find my name among those passionate people who’d been born with the gift that transformed a nobody into an artist: Talent.
In every studio class I took, there were always students who had it with a capital T. Starting the first day of class, the teacher would gather us around their drawing pads to admire work the rest of us would never have the skill to match. If the class was taught by a figurative artist or a landscape painter, the special student’s work would be eerily lifelike. In one painting class where the teacher arrived every day with a purple satin cape draped over his shoulders, students who did the most outlandish work received the most praise.
The star students also seemed the loveliest. The girls were waifs, with thick untamed curls temporarily held back by purple silk scarves. They wore layers of leotard tops, flowing blouses and floor-length skirts pulled off thrift store racks and looked as if they’d stepped off a fashion runway.
The guys were equally stunning. Most left a dusting of stubble on their cheeks and chins. Their hair was tousled and thick, and they sported worn brown leather jackets with small, necessary rips.
My teachers flagrantly forgot my name. I worked in isolation, knowing I’d never merit a single word of praise.
Instead of learning the most intrinsic lesson about making art, that one needs to work steadily and consistently to improve, I took on my teachers’ beliefs, many of whom were artists who felt they’d failed. Like them, I assumed some had it and some didn’t, and I was one of the large uninspired group of humanity that didn’t.
Once I left school it didn’t take long to give up. The freedom I’d felt doodling outdoors or sketching quick portraits of my friends had been replaced by a tight timidity whenever I tried to work.
I had the sense that when a real artist stepped in front of the canvas, divine inspiration spilled from his hands. I stood in front of my easel and listened to the hum of the refrigerator, wondering what might be in there for me to eat.
The urge to make art came back to me slowly. I’d notice it coming on from time to time, mostly when I was outdoors. It would seize me like the desire for a fudgesicle or a vanilla malt, or the memory of a long-ago afternoon relaxing at the beach.
Decades after I’d given art up, the desire to paint and draw became especially strong. By then, I had taken to going on long walks, up and down the steep streets of San Francisco where I lived. As I climbed past the colorful Victorians in my neighborhood of Lower Pacific Heights to the mansions of Presidio Heights, the light before sunset would turn the white and pale-yellow stucco walls golden.
From my studio apartment, I hiked up and down hills, to the Financial District where I worked. On Nob Hill, I’d walk past old brick apartment buildings whose window boxes burst with blooms and the pink and purple butterfly wings of bougainvillea fluttered against the walls. I’d drop down Sacramento Street, stepping slowly because the incline heading toward Chinatown was nearly ninety degrees. I’d pass the sidewalk stands in Chinatown, with their stalks of deep green bok choy and beige onions and red peppers piled high. Old Chinese women would pass, in red and black silk padded jackets, their black pants stopping short of their ankles, and their feet clad in tiny blue and white Nikes.
One day, seeing San Francisco didn’t seem enough. I needed to experience the physical act of capturing what I saw.
The course description was upbeat, claiming everyone had the ability to draw. Drawing wasn’t, it went on, an innate gift, but a skill anyone could acquire. All one had to do was learn to use the right, intuitive side of the brain, instead of the left, analytical part.
The class was held in the Sharon Art Studio, located in Golden Gate Park. By this time, I had moved to a flat in the Richmond District, on a street that straddled the park. Each Saturday morning, I walked briskly over to the 25th Avenue entrance, on the north side. More often than not, the fog lay draped over the branches of the eucalyptus trees. I’d walk past the tall crane and stacks of metal and wood at the art museum construction site and keep going, until I passed the long green lawn spilling out below the fragile white Victorian Conservatory of Flowers. Here, plantings in clever patterns appeared each week, and the tourists piled off buses to snap photos. Then, I’d head over toward the children’s playground, next to which the Sharon Art Studio sat.
In the first room, men and women worked with clay. After passing the clay studio, I would enter a dark narrow hall, where drawings from the life class hung on both walls. My class met in the first room to the right.
Each week, we did exercises unlike anything I’d done as an art student. We held pictures upside down and drew what we saw, then flipped our work right-side up, amazed at its accuracy. We drew without looking at the page. We sketched furiously and fast.
Instead of the Darwinish art education I’d had when I was younger, this art training aimed at ensuring that we survived. Our teacher’s goal was not to weed out the smattering of students she deemed to have promise, but to make sure we all went on to draw.
And I did. Tentatively, at first. I was worried about repeating the negative experiences of the past. So, I took the beginning drawing class a second time.
Eventually, I did move on. The next class I took, a one-day workshop on the figure in paper and clay, helped my spirit soar. Running my fingers through the damp gray clay felt like swimming back into the womb. Losing myself in forming the figure with my hands, hours passed like a minute, making me feel as if I’d been reborn.
I am taking Phil’s Introduction to Drawing class for the third time. The studio where we meet sits on a busy street full of shops and restaurants in Southeast Portland, Oregon, where I live now. As I did in San Francisco, I walk to class. This time of year, the sidewalks are strewn with leaves -- red, bright yellow and brown.
They say the third time’s a charm and in my case it’s true. I’m finally beginning to understand art.
Art is garbage. It is, as Phil loves to remind us, committing to the monster. It’s crashing and burning, going down with the plane, because only out of the wreckage can we save ourselves. The world I enter when my fingers are black with charcoal and my torso sways in time with my hand is a soothing balm to the injuries the rest of life inflicts. The emphasis on the end product of art by my early teachers made me lose sight of this.
Art, after all, is the voice that cries out over and over again, I want to make. It’s returning to the days when playing with clay and coloring, or smearing paint and glue across a page, felt like the most fun thing a kid could do. It’s about going to a place where the rest of the world stops and all that exists is you and the charcoal and the page.
Phil says it takes three hundred figure drawings before you ever make a good one. At our last class, he shows us the video I’ve seen twice before, of Pablo Picasso painting. Every time I think Picasso is done, he covers the canvas in white paint and starts the painting over again.
After all these years, I am learning what Picasso must have known: Mistakes are what count. That’s what Phil means by committing to the monster. That’s the point of garbage.
The session is over, and our mad drawings taunt us from the walls of this room. Phil holds his hand above mine, like Dick Clark on American Bandstand, waiting to hear the rousing applause that will signal the winning couple. Every hand in the room goes up, except mine.
Phil walks over to where I’m standing, the heat in my face certain to have turned it a shocking shade of pink. Then he hands me the prize -- a tiny, black plastic gorilla.
“For courage,” he says and grins.
My fellow students have not raised their hands in recognition of my talent or for the exquisiteness of my technique. I have won this prize because I was willing to let go and have a ball. That, in the end, has made me feel that I have at last captured the starring role.
~
A slightly longer version of “Garbage” was previously published in Even When Trapped Behind Clouds, by Patty Somlo (WiDo Publishing, 2016)
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Patty Somlo’s most recent book, Hairway to Heaven Stories (Cherry Castle Publishing) was a Finalist in the American Fiction Awards and Best Book Awards. Previous books, The First to Disappear (Spuyten Duyvil) and Even When Trapped Behind Clouds: A Memoir of Quiet Grace (WiDo Publishing), were Finalists in several contests. Her work has appeared in Guernica, Delmarva Review, Under the Sun, the Los Angeles Review, and over 40 anthologies. She received Honorable Mention for Fiction in the Women’s National Book Association Contest, was a Finalist in the J.F. Powers Short Fiction Contest, had an essay selected as Notable for Best American Essays, and has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net multiple times.
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Author's Note:
“Garbage,” a piece about a wonderful teacher whose unique approach aimed at turning all of his students into artists, means a lot to me because my earlier art education did the opposite, with teachers implying that only a select few students had the talent to succeed. The piece fits the theme of this issue as it illustrates that when educators widen their expectations, they make it possible for every student to soar. One favorite quote from the piece, “I assumed no matter how hard I tried, I would never find my name among those passionate people who’d been born with the gift that transformed a nobody into an artist: Talent.”