Fear of the Blank Page

This is the second week of school and I'm beginning to see a lot of distressed students struggling with their first writing assignments of the semester. I have to  keep quiet about what the teachers do though it isn't easy. This year a teacher asked his freshmen class to write a paper analyzing a Sartre piece for their first college paper ever.

So, it was interesting to talk to this one kid because he seemed so much like myself. He is a transfer student (like I was) majoring in the same thing I majored in at art school. He has a terrible fear of the blank page and that extends to both writing and drawing. We talked about the drawing issue in conjunction with the writing issue.

In light of this, I must confess that I hate to draw. I'm sure that this is also the fear of the blank page, which I assured the kid that many artists have (myself included). I mean, I really hate drawing. I freeze up and make little inept things that I hate. I can't even draw cartoons anymore, which was my passion for a long time.

(Photo by spekulator of Stock.xchng)

In college I always had this idea that I was drawing retarded or something. I hate painting, too, for reasons that I haven't explored yet. In community college I took a lot of drawing classes and I enjoyed them but in that school we didn't advance very fall. When I was putting together a portfolio to get into art school I took a  lot of the art school's adult education classes to build my portfolio. There, I took a great class where I felt I finally learned well. Actually, it was based on the book Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain. (Many public libraries have it.) I really felt I had an excellent teacher and I bonded with her. She was a gifted person who spent a lot of time with us. I want to write about her at one point because I took a class with her again later, but that is for another entry.

I got into art school but always had the impression that it was by the skin of my teeth and that my drawing was not strong enough. The only drawing class I enjoyed in art school was nature drawing, probably because I love nature and I enjoy drawing organic subjects. They lend themselves well to the expressive line work I like.

I haven't really drawn much since I left school. A.R.T.S. Anonymous recommends doing your art at least 5 minutes a day. Well, with drawing I can't even do that. I don't even want to look at a sketchbook. Somehow, I feel like I can't draw anything significant and it is almost like I am back to the beginning again -- I think I've forgotten how to draw.

So, anyway, thinking about this kid. sometimes I go through phases where I think I hate my job and then soothe myself by realizing that God keeps me here for a reason. So, this semester I'm going to try to be a little more open and try to learn more from my students and the other people around me here.