Thoughts on Drawing
by Annie Kornack
It’s really funny how when you’re little, probably of
elementary age, when asked in a classroom filled with other children which of
you are artists, the odds are most will raise their hand. I’ve always thought I
was an artist. When asked to introduce myself to new people in elementary
school using an adjective with the same letter as my first name, I’d always
reply “Artistic Annie.” Still to this day I think art plays a very
important role in who I am.
Throughout high school I took many art classes – ranging
from Ceramics, Silkscreen, 3D Art, Drawing, and Computer Graphic Design – you
name what my school offered and I took it. Especially my senior year of high
school taking Silkscreen Printing I learned the importance of utilizing your
artistic license to create unique, eye-catching pieces. I even was awarded the
Silver Key Award from the Boston Museum of Art and the Excellence in Art Award
my senior year. So, long story short, I love art.
Coming to Duke I soon realized a lot of other people shared
my passion of art, yet no one really tried to go to the Nasher collection they
thought was so intriguing or take that trip to the Arts Annex to throw some
clay. Luckily I was able to get myself involved in the duuVisArts Committee on
Campus and even got a volunteering position at the Children’s Hospital with
Arts for Life, teaching crafts to some of the patients. But still it was sad
how little talk there was about art at Duke, especially since art played such a
huge role in my high school experience.
Some of my art from high school
As I’ve discussed I really like art, my only problem with
art is that I need it to be perfect. This causes some problems when you really
love art but are sometimes too scared to delve into it with fear of it not
turning out “correctly.” In taking this class I thought I would be gaining a
creative outlet that would calm my freshmen nerves, but in all honestly there
were times when I became frustrated due to my need for perfection, especially
since Duke fosters an environment where everyone feels this pressure to appear
perfect.
It sounds stupid but at the beginning of the semester even
in my sketchbook – which is a place for sketches
that are allowed to be unfinished and messy and stupid – I had this yearning
for each page to be this magical little work of art worthy of being pinned up
on the wall. Also, I think the materials posed a little bit of a barrier for me
since I love exploring with color and different mediums and this class was
strictly pencil and charcoal. Don’t get me wrong, like I said a million times I
love art, especially silkscreen printing and watercoloring, but I was surprised
when I would let myself fixate over what to draw and how to draw it, normally
wasting valuable drawing time by being inside my head.
Maybe I lacked the confidence in myself since Duke can so
easily do that to you. Once we started moving away from drawing objects in class
to trying to convey stories was when I think this mentality of perfection
started to drift away a little bit and I was able to start doing art for myself
again. I think it’s easy to get caught up in the little things at Duke and I’m
glad over the course of this class I was able to remember the necessity to just
create and draw stupid things that no one has to see but have the potential to
make me feel something.
I took all this newfound knowledge and was able to replicate
some of these emotions into my final drawing for this class, the fictional
narrative. I was inspired by the extremely low acceptance rate for the Class of
2021 so I chose to do a narrative about what Duke is like. I first placed the
ever-mighty Chapel directly in the center of the page with three hands poking
out from the corners. The first hand gently dangled a key that said “Accepted,”
the second hand reached forward for the key to this “magical school” and the
last hand held a rainbow above the Chapel (either placing the rainbow over the
Chapel or potentially taking it away). I wanted there to be some mixture of
representation in this image. The two bottom hands (the key and the reaching
ones) could either represent an overjoyed student and an angry rejected one
jealous of the other, or the reaching hand could be trying to help the accepted
student not get to this place of competition, or the two hands could be from
the same person experiencing this internal conflict I think most Duke students
have of loving Duke but at the same time hating its pressures. This all ties
into the dual meanings of the rainbow hand – is the rainbow placed above Duke a
lie? Is it really a magical place? Is it a falsely magical place? Should it be
stripped of its fairytale reputation? I know that explanation probably makes
little sense without fully seeing the drawing, but I just wanted to highlight
how this class reminded me to make my art mean something. Although I’ll
probably never get over my perfectionistic outlook on my own art, I was still able
to appreciate the different styles to drawing that each of my classmates had,
making me want to explore more into other styles of drawing, instead of
sticking to my home base where perfection reigns.
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