Toe in the Water

The Rebel Reflects

The Rebel Reflects

When I was young, I was going to be the world’s greatest artist. I went to university, confident in the knowledge that I could draw and paint better than anyone else. On my first day in the Fine Arts department, the whole class of us freshers was introduced to our tutor, a diminutive woman with tousled hair and tatty jeans. She led us into the next room where a great mess of chairs, planks, paint pots, cloths, and unidentifiable junk was heaped in the middle of the room. Around it were easels and each of us was assigned to one of them.

“Draw that,” our tutor said, pointing at the chaos of materials before us.

So we began, every one of us confident that we would have no trouble in drawing anything put in front of us. That tiny woman prowled around the circle of us, stopping at one and then another to point at an angle of a plank or the position of a pot. “That’s wrong,” she’d say. “Consider it in relation to the ladder.”

We’d look again and see that she was right - our drawing was hopelessly out of kilter and all the angles were wrong. And she kept doing it, just pointing out what was wrong and making us erase what we’d done to start again. At the end of the day, we were beginning to realise that we were not artists at all. We couldn’t draw to save our lives.

The next day she explained that we had to learn to see before we could draw. We were interpreting the world without really seeing it as it was. So we continued, attempting to draw the pile of junk and gradually getting closer to reality.

By the end of the first week, we could all draw because we could all see. That plank that had caused us so much trouble was now at the angle it was in reality; the paint pot that moved about at will had been nailed down and stood exactly where it always had been.

I learned several things from the lady in that first week. Most obviously, I knew then that I was not God’s gift to the artistic world and that I had scarcely begun to travel the road that might, one day, lead to the production of reasonably good works. But I also knew that anyone, absolutely everyone, in fact, could be taught to see and therefore to draw. We bold few, who could now draw whatever was presented before us, were nothing special. The fact that none of us had failed to complete the week with flying colours was proof of that. And I knew that we owed our tutor an enormous debt of gratitude for her patience in cajoling us from our hopelessly skewed vision of reality.

For some time, I have been a little surprised at the number of instructive and educational forums in WdC on the subject of writing. No doubt these are all necessary and many of us benefit a great deal from attending such things. Just as I did so long ago as a Fine Arts student.

Yet I would add a caveat. What I did not mention about the Fine Arts Department was the painting side of things. It was shortly after that first week that we were called upon to decide which way we were going to go, painting or sculpture. And I decided, surprising even myself, to opt for sculpture.

The reason was that, by that time, I had the time to inspect the work of the second and third year students and had noticed a disturbing trend. By the time they were in their third year, every student was painting stuff exactly like the work of the painting tutor. And I did not want to end up as a clone, no matter how good the tutor was. The tiny sculpture division received another recruit.

Someone once said that rules are made to be broken. This is always quoted when an excuse for breaking the rules is needed. But it’s true as long as we actually know and can work within the rules. Once we can do that, it’s a good idea to break the rules when the work is made better as a result.

It’s how the rules are made. Writers break the bounds and, in time, the new ground they break becomes tamed and accepted territory with its own rules and regulations. If you want to be a great writer, know those rules and then cross the border into the wild, wild frontier where all that matters is getting the message across better than anyone else.

Winston Churchill was told that he should not end a sentence with a preposition, to which he replied, “This is something up with which I will not put.” And, if I want to start a sentence with the word “and,” I will.


Word Count: 820