Thoughts on Drawing - Cuquis Robledo

Coming into Drawing 199, I had just taken a semester off from Art classes. Ever since I was little, I was always doing art of some sort, from painting to working with dry pastels. I took an IB Art Course in high school, and while excited for it, it did not meet my expectations. When I tried to express myself, I was shot down because my teacher was worried the concept was too "literal." And when explaining our pieces, we were not allowed to say we like our piece, or any piece, because it looked "pretty." We had to give these complex explanations about why we chose a certain medium and why did we place figures here and there. But isn't one aspect of art is aesthetics? What if the artist's intention was just to create a beautiful scene? I feel in the art world nowadays, we complicate the meaning behind the artist's work when actually, the meaning can be just quite simple. We end up putting words in the artist's mouth.

That is why I took Drawing 199; because I knew that this class was going to focus on realistic objects -- my strength -- rather than conceptual concepts and meanings. It felt good to sit for hours in quiet, just feeling the graphite of my pencil meet the paper, feeling the graphite and charcoal on my hands. It was my time to not think of anything. I soon realized though that IB Art had not taught me any techniques regarding drawing (it was more like a self-discovery class). For instance, we were never taught how to make our drawing proportional to the actual still-life, and we briefly went over techniques about foreground, middle-ground and background.

Out of all of these techniques I learned my favorites is using the eraser as a blending tool so that it gives the charcoal a sculptural feel. Here is an example of one of my favorite pieces from class. It was the photographic drawing: It's called "Heaven," and it is in memory of my oldest dog, Patches (dog on the left).

I know I am going to keep doing art, but probably more as a hobby and not as a Visual Arts major just because I like to take the liberty to express myself without the constraints of a class. However, Drawing 199 did help reinforce some of my drawing skills I knew and introduced me to new ones a well. I can also say that I am definitely more of a realistic drawer than a fictitious one. I am glad that I decided to take art again though, so I could be creative again.