Part Two: Art School

I was very small when I started to draw — five, perhaps six. I liked it. My mother noticed. We lived in a small town where there was almost nothing for a child to do, and she found the one place that taught drawing, and asked if I wanted to go. I wanted to go.

For the first year I loved it.

They gave me things I had never had words for. How a row of poles narrows and draws together as it runs away from the eye, and why. How to lay gouache so the color sits flat and clean. Where a shadow falls on a table, and where the light catches the lip of a jug and turns it, for one stroke, white. All of it was new. At home I went over the perspective exercises again: the horizon line, rows of little poles, geometric shapes. I had the feeling that a door had swung open onto a country I had not known was there, and that I was being walked through it.

But what I was being shown was only the entrance to that country. You cannot know that in the first year, or even the second. In the first year you cannot tell a wall from the horizon, and the world is enormous, because you have just arrived in it.

The first two years were full: there was always some new rule, some new material. Somewhere in the third year I began to feel that the lessons were standing still, and from then on the feeling never left me.

Let me first show you the shape of a week: you can see in it what repeated from lesson to lesson. Each of the five days of the week had its own subject. One day was the history of art, and we drew nothing. One day was painting, and we drew the jugs. One day was modeling, and we built copies of the plaster casts up in plasticine. One day was graphic work, pencil and pastel. And one day — I will come to that day, because it was the one that mattered and the one that hurt the most.

The jugs, then. A setup would go up on a table — a jug or two, a cloth, the light from the window — and because we were children, and slow, it took three or four lessons to carry one drawing to its finish. So the setup stayed where it was, untouched, for weeks. Nobody moved it. I sat in front of the same jug, the same fold of cloth, the same fall of light, lesson after lesson, and then at last it came down and another went up that was not very different, and I sat in front of that one for weeks. The same on the graphic day. The objects could, in principle, have been combined a hundred ways — there were several jugs in the cupboard, cloths of different colors, a few plastic fruits. In practice I lived with one arrangement at a time, for a long time, and the arrangements were cousins of each other.

But the setups were not the whole of it, and that took me years to see. Even when the setup changed, I drew the new one the way I had drawn the old: the same way of laying the shadow, the same handling of the cloth, and the same mistakes, in the same places, that I had made the week before. I already knew where a shadow falls and where the light catches the lip of a jug, and I laid in the shadow and the highlight the same way on every jug, without really looking at the one in front of me.

In the modeling room it was nearer to plain repetition. We built the copies up from nothing in plasticine, working the form with our thumbs until it stood — real work, the kind that teaches a hand something. But there were only so many casts. A nose. An eye. A face. One of them stayed on the table for weeks, exactly as a jug did. Sooner or later the nose came around again, and then the eye, and then the face, and we built them again from nothing, and the nothing was the same nothing as before.

Now the day I set aside.

One day a week was composition. The teacher would give us a theme — sometimes a scene from the Bible, sometimes something else. The themes were broad, with plenty of space for imagination, and we chose what to draw and how. That day was the door standing open. It was the one day the school asked us not to copy a jug but to make something that came from us, to go into the country of art and bring back what we had found there.

One theme I still remember: “a spaceport of the future.” I had just started reading science fiction. There were no pictures in those books, only descriptions, and I imagined the ships and buildings of the future for myself. On composition day I carried those images onto paper: I sat over the sheet asking myself what a ship like that might look like, what a building like that might be. I had been curious about art in general from the very start, and the teachers had answered that curiosity with new rules. This was a curiosity about the work itself. The teacher praised the drawing, and then it was sent to an exhibition in another town. For a long time, the composition day was my favorite. You can feel, I think, why it should have been: the school left room for release, once a week, on a timetable.

And by the third year I could not use it.

I would come to the composition day already emptied out by the four days around it — the jugs, the casts, the sameness of my own drawings — and the openness that should have been the best thing in the week found nothing in me to meet it. I did not experiment. I did not reach. I drew the same figures I had drawn before, the same objects, over and over, because reaching for something new took a fire I no longer arrived with on a Friday. The one door the school left open, I walked past under my own power, too tired to turn the handle. That is the part I understand only now, and it is worse than a locked door would have been. A locked door you can rage at. An open door you are too exhausted to walk through, you simply learn to stop noticing.

The first time I felt all of this plainly — not the open door yet, just the loop underneath it — something small and cold went through me that I could not name. It needs an exact name, because it comes back more than once in this book, and it arrived disguised as almost nothing.

It was the feeling of a road.

You are traveling a road into country you have never seen. Around each bend there is more of it — a new field, a new ridge, a turning you did not expect. You are watching the road the way a child watches everything, sure that whatever comes next will be more interesting still. And then the road stops going forward. It loops. You come around a bend and it is the bend from twenty minutes ago, the same fence, the same tree, and you tell yourself you are mistaken, and you come around again and it is the same tree. No one has told you that you have arrived. No one has said the journey is over. You are still driving, still doing the thing that felt like going somewhere. You are simply no longer going anywhere.

That is what it became. Not a wall in front of me — a wall you could have seen. A loop, dressed as a road, with one exit a week that I grew too tired to take.

I did not have any of this then. I had a small coldness, once, and then I had it again, and I learned not to look at it, the way you learn not to touch a sore tooth with your tongue. We went on drawing the jugs.

Here is how we were taught to draw.

There were three teachers — one for drawing, one for the modeling, one for the history of art. But I spent most of my hours with the drawing teacher, so let me stay with her.

She taught in several ways. She would explain a rule and show how it worked — how a highlight falls, for instance. She would sit down at a student’s work and help with the pencil sketch: finding the true proportions of a jug or a plaster cast and applying the laws of perspective to them. When a child could not mix the right shade on the palette, she would show how to get it.

And when a student finished a drawing, she would come and put the finishing touch on it.

She was good. Everything I am about to say has to be heard with that underneath. She had a real hand, trained over many years, and when she took up the brush you could see it — the shadow deepened in exactly the right place, the highlight landed on the rim where the light would have caught it, the form came forward off the paper. She was correcting our work toward what it should have been. Every touch was right.

And we gathered to watch. The whole class would leave their own easels and crowd around the one she was working on, because we understood it to be the lesson — the chance to stand close and see a skilled hand do the thing our hands could not yet do. I stood in that half-circle many times. I thought I was being given something precious. I was. That is the part it took me until now to understand: I was being given something precious, and it was being laid down exactly on top of the thing I actually needed, so that I never found the second thing because the first one was so good.

Because here is what the finishing touch did, week after week, to the work of every one of us. Her shadow. Her highlight. Her sense of where the light breaks. Her hand had a style — every trained hand does — and the style went down onto each student’s sheet in turn, the same confident shadow, the same placed highlight, until the finished works in our group all carried the same hand at the top of them. Underneath, the drawings were different, because we were different children with different clumsy beginnings. On top, they were the same.

I told you that art is a country, and that the student’s real task is to find their own place in it — the one spot that is theirs to stand in, from which the country looks the way it looks to no one else. Hold that beside a woman moving down a row of easels, laying her own place in the country gently over each child’s sheet, in good faith, because her place was a good place and theirs were not yet anything. I am not going to say more about it than that here. I only want you to see it, because I did not see it. I was in the half-circle, admiring the hand.

There was one day the half-circle went quiet.

One of the students in our group drew better than the rest of us — visibly, in a way even children could see, though none of us could have said what the difference was or where it came from, and so we called it the only thing we had a word for, which was talent. He had finished a work, and it was alive in a way our jugs were not, and the teacher came to put the finishing touch on it.

I watched her hand go down. And then I watched the work die.

I cannot tell you the mechanics of it; I did not have the eye to catch what specifically went wrong. I can tell you the room knew. There was a silence of a minute or two — long, for a room of children — in which everyone looked at the sheet and understood, without a word and without the words to make it a word, that something that had been there a moment ago was now gone. The teacher saw it too. She looked at what her hand had done, and she said, out loud, I ruined the work. I’m sorry.

After that she was more careful: she no longer touched the works that were already good, or the ones done in a manner different from hers, so as not to ruin them. But on the other sheets the finishing touch went on as before, and not on a whim: it was part of a method she followed conscientiously.

Here is the method itself — the most natural and the most common way there is to teach an art. If you are going to teach drawing to a room of children, you have a problem before you start: how will you know whether a drawing is any good? A sum is right or wrong; a verb is conjugated correctly or it is not; but a drawing? So you solve the problem the only way it can be cleanly solved. You set a task with a correct answer. Here is a jug; draw the jug; the jug on the paper should look like the jug on the table. Now the work can be measured. You can stand over a sheet and see precisely how far the drawn jug falls from the real one, and say so, and the child can close the gap, and you can watch the gap close. The shadow goes where the shadow goes. The highlight goes where the light actually breaks. There is a right place for everything, and your job is to walk the child toward it.

This is a good method. It builds a hand. Perspective, how to lay gouache flat and clean, the white edge of the highlight — all of that came to me through it, and I have it still. The trouble is not in the method. The trouble is that the method has an end it cannot see past. It can carry a student all the way to the correct jug and not one step further, because past the correct jug there is no correct answer, and a method built entirely on measuring against the correct answer has nothing to say without one. And past the correct jug — where there is no right place for the shadow, only your place — is where art actually begins.

The finishing touch is that method reaching its own edge. A drawing arrives at the point where it has stopped being a wrong copy of the jug and started being a right something-else, the child’s own. The method has no name for that, no way to grade it, no way even to see it, and so it does the only thing it knows: it measures the sheet against the correct answer one more time, finds the places where the child’s own rightness departs from it, and corrects them. Toward the jug. Toward the teacher’s hand. Toward the sample. The departures that were the child finding their own place get tidied away as errors, because to a method that can only measure against a sample, that is exactly what they look like.

Now, in my teachers’ defense. Think about what they actually did. In a small town that offered a child almost nothing, they gave their years to teaching the children of that town an art most of those children would otherwise never have touched. We came in with bad brushes and worse paint, and they taught us the actual rudiments of drawing, and they gave us those rudiments honestly, and patiently, and without ever once making us ashamed of the brushes we had. And now and then the routine changed. The drawing teacher would have us draw from our own photographs, or sit one of us down to pose for a portrait while the others drew. That was rare, and came around the middle of my time there, but those lessons held our interest. Once the modeling teacher showed us a technique that was new to us, linocut, and for four or five lessons each of us worked on a print of our own. I worked hard on mine; I couldn’t wait to see how the impression would come out. Later it went to an exhibition. There was real devotion in everything my teachers did for us, and I felt it even as a child.

And the method was not theirs. They did not invent the jug and the cast and the correct answer. They were most likely taught this way themselves: in their day, art colleges followed a standard curriculum. And the method had reached them along a line that runs further back than any of us in that room could have known — the cast before the live model, the copy before the composition, the correct proportion drilled for years. It is one of the oldest ways there is to build a hand, and it has built some of the best hands that ever lived. My teachers received it and passed it on in good faith, the way you pass on the thing that was given to you, trusting it because they came through it. The method worked on the children who kept drawing at home with or without it. On those children it looked like a triumph, and the triumph confirmed the method, and so the method went on. On the rest of us it ran its loop and laid its good hand gently on top, and we stood in the half-circle and admired it. The failure, as far as I could ever see, was never in anyone’s heart. It was in a method that could carry us to the correct jug and had nowhere to take us after — and in the fact that we were never shown there was anywhere else to go.

There is somewhere else to go. I know it now the way you know a thing you were not given — by the shape of its absence. Somewhere past the correct jug there is a teacher who builds your hand against their right answer exactly as mine did, and then, at the one moment it matters, steps back and lets you draw something they would not have drawn, and keeps their own hand off it. I have come to think that single motion is the whole test of a teacher: a good teacher makes you freer from their judgment, and a lesser one keeps you bound to it. It sounds wrong at first, because we are taught to prize the teacher whose standard we most want to meet — but a standard you can never stop reaching for is a teacher you can never leave. And the point of any of it is to be walked to the edge of what can be measured and then set loose past it, to find the place that is yours and that no one’s judgment, however good, can hand you. The stepping-back is not the absence of teaching. It is the last and hardest thing a teacher does, and it is the one thing a method made entirely of correct answers can neither perform nor even see.

At the end of my third year a boy I knew arrived.

He was from my ordinary school — the general one, the one with all the subjects — and I had not expected to see him at the easels. At first I was glad to see a familiar face. I asked him how long he had been drawing, and what had made him come. I had three years on him. I had the laws of perspective, the placing of shadows, the white edge of the highlight. I was already imagining how I would look to him.

Then we were sent to the same class, and the gladness went out of me.

I tried to fix it, gently. I took him aside and tried to warn him — politely, as a friend, so he would not be embarrassed — that this class was too far along, that he could not start here, that it would be too hard. He told me the teacher had sent him here: the school sorted children into classes by age, not by skill, and by age he belonged in ours. I thought I was protecting a friend from a deep cave. I was standing at the mouth of a closet, telling him it was too deep to enter.

He entered. And the teacher began, with him, again from the start — the perspective, the gouache, the shadows, all of it, the things I had taken three years to be given. It did not take him an afternoon, and it did not take him three years either. After half a year, about half a dozen jugs in, he had caught up with those of us who drew least well, and everyone already counted him as one of the group. After a year he drew the way most of us did. It was a real stretch of work: he was not a prodigy skipping ahead; he was an ordinary beginner doing the ordinary thing.

I still drew a little better than he did, but not by much. Sometimes my work came out poorly and his came out very well, and then the teacher held him up to me as an example. The year it took him is the only number in this story that matters, and I read it, at the time, exactly upside down.

Here is what I concluded, sitting in that class, watching a boy cover in a year the distance I had crossed in three years: then the three years are worth nothing. If he can stand where I stand after a year, then I have no talent: it took me three years to get there.

It is a reasonable conclusion. That is the terrible thing about it. If it had taken him an afternoon I would have laughed it off — no one believes three years can be undone in an afternoon. But a year of honest work is enough to make the arithmetic feel sound. A careful child does that arithmetic and arrives where I arrived. The motivation that had been thinning since the third year did not thin further now. It broke.

And the conclusion was wrong, though the evidence was real and the reasoning was sound.

The year it took the newcomer was not the measure of what I was worth. It showed how close the method’s edge lay. He had also started older than I once had, and at that age the basics come faster. A year cannot bring a beginner level with someone who has been walked three years deep into the art — the distance between them is real, and a year does not cross it. A year can bring a beginner level with someone who has spent all three years in a single lit corner, copying the same jugs, the same casts, and has never once gone further — because there is only the corner to learn, and a corner can be learned quickly.

The newcomer catching me was not proof that I had no talent. It was proof only that in three years I had not gone past the correct jug. I read it as a verdict on myself, though it was about the method’s edge. But I was a child, and the boy was right there beside me drawing the same jug almost as well as I drew it, and the verdict landed on me, and I signed it.

There were two children who began when I began — a boy and a girl — and from the very start their drawings were better than mine. Not a little better. They saw a thing and their hands did what they had seen; mine did something close to it, and then I fixed it, and fixed it again. They moved forward and I labored, and the gap between us did not close over the years. It widened. I watched it widen and looked for an explanation. The explanation a child could find fit into one word: talent. They had it and I did not. It explained everything, and I believed it for most of my life.

Whether some children are simply born nearer to drawing than others, I cannot say; perhaps they are. But what I took for talent in the boy who began alongside me was in front of me the whole time — I was only too young to read it. I knew him a little; we were something like friends. And he drew at home. He drew all the time. He filled the margins of his ordinary schoolbooks during the dull lessons; he drew in his own hours for no reason and no grade, because his hand wanted to and he let it. No one had told him to. No one was watching.

The hours he put in that no one counted — because they happened at home, for love, before anyone called it anything — were the hours that built the hand I was calling talent. The boy could not stop drawing, while my drawing had shrunk to four days of jugs a week. The difference between us was not in what we were born with but in how many undepleted hours each of us had spent doing the thing for love. He had spent thousands. I had spent thousands of hours in the art school’s rooms as well, but fewer of them were undepleted with every year, and at home I drew less and less.

That is why talent is the most dangerous word in this book: the question itself is a trap, and I sat inside it for years.

Ask do I have talent and you have already lost, whichever way the answer falls. If it comes back no, every ordinary difficulty that no hand is built without suddenly has an explanation: the trouble is not work you failed to do but a nature you cannot change. You can quit now with a clear conscience, and the answer proves itself: the one who quits really never learns. If it comes back yes, you lean on talent instead of on the hours: it feels as if you have already arrived — so why take on the dull work that builds a hand? Your learning stops right there, and the hand stops growing with it. The question cannot help you. It can only license you to stop.

Whether or not some children are born nearer to drawing, the child who keeps drawing closes the distance, and the child who decides the distance is fixed sits down — and almost every time a child decides the distance is fixed, they have mistaken I was given fewer hours for I was given less. I made that mistake at the easel for years. I am asking you not to make it. Stop asking whether you have it. Spend the hours, for love, the way the boy did.

There was another boy in our group — not one of the two I have just told you about. Those two had been beside me from the first day. This one arrived at the end of my seventh year and already drew well when he came. His work did not look like ours after the finishing touch. I asked him where he had learned it, and he told me he had taught himself, and had come to us for the theory. He spent hours of his own time, most days, on sketches and studies and work on his own subjects — things no one had assigned, problems no one had set him. He liked making things that were not there before. That was the whole engine of it: he liked it, and so he did it for hours, and the hours did to his hand what undepleted hours do.

By then I had been in the school seven years.

I would look at his sheet and then at mine, and the distance between them was not a distance you could close with another year of jugs, and I knew it. Let me give you what my eye landed on, because the conclusion came from specific things and I do not want to hand you the conclusion without them.

He set the curve of a jug’s rim down correctly on the first stroke. Mine took three tries — lay it, see it was wrong, erase it, lay it again. His line fell along the form and made it round; you could feel the swell of the jug under the stroke. Mine sat on the surface and flattened it, most of the time, so the jug looked painted on. He drew a cube or a pyramid nearly true the first time; I got there after many attempts or did not get there at all.

But the thing under all three differences was this: he felt the form. His hand was answering the jug. Mine was answering the teacher — placing the shadow where I had been told shadows go, laying the highlight where the rule said the light would break, applying advice from the outside onto a form I could not feel. He had a fire moving through a hand he had built himself, and the two had joined, and the joining was the thing I could see on the paper and could not do. I was still applying instructions to a surface. He was drawing what was there.

I did not have those words then. I had the sheets, side by side, and the question they put to me, which I asked myself plainly: what have I learned in seven years, if a boy with no art school simply draws far better than I do?

The answer was sitting right in front of me, and it said, quietly: nothing worth anything. You learned nothing.

I believed it, and I went on believing it for most of my life. Everything after this is a reading I could make only now. I need you to see how clean the trap was, how it was built out of true things, how a careful and honest child walked straight into the middle of it and signed his name.

Everything I saw was real. His rim was true on the first stroke and mine was not. His line held the form and mine flattened it. He had taught himself in his own hours what I had not learned in seven years. Every fact was a fact, not my invention.

And the conclusion was false. I have no talent — that is how I read a difference that was really about hours. He spent hours of his own, most days, on his own subjects — which is to say he had a composition day every day, and came to it undepleted, because nothing had spent him before he sat down. Alone in his room, at his own table, he went into the country of art and brought back what he had found there, again and again, for the pleasure of it. That is the whole of what he did, and it is exactly the thing the school offered me one afternoon a week, while the other four days left me too tired to accept it.

Nor was it that he loved drawing more: I had arrived, at five, with the same fire he had; the small boy who liked to draw was on fire about it exactly the way the self-taught boy still was. Alone, in his own room, he reached the release again and again — the place a school ought to bring a student to. I was heading there in the early years, on composition days: work on themes of my own fed my fire and built my hand. But my hand could not yet carry that fire the way I wanted. And then I stopped going — not because the door was locked, but because by the time I reached it each week I had nothing left to carry through it.

The self-taught boy was not proof that I had no talent. His sheet showed what the release looks like when it happens. Mine, right beside it, showed what it costs when the release never happens. I read neither. I read the one thing the two sheets did not say: I have no talent.

I took the boy who had reached the release, and the year it took the newcomer, and the finishing touch I had admired, and I read every one of them as a sentence on myself. Sometimes a fire goes out just like this — quietly, reasonably: a child reasons without a single mistake, and lays down the brush, and feels only relief. The only mistake was a single assumption: that the difference between the sheets measured talent and not hours.

I told my mother more than once that I wanted to stop. The time I remember best was in the fifth year, or near it. That time I said the thing that was true and small: that we did the same work over and over, that I had stopped learning anything new, that it had become a boring routine. All of which was accurate, and none of which reached what had actually happened, because I did not have the words for it. I had only the boredom, which was the surface of it.

She did not agree, and her reasons were good. She said I had been at it a long time, and that you do not abandon a thing halfway with so much already spent on it. She gave another reason too, one I understand completely now that I am older: there was no other place. The alternative to the art school was not a better school. It was the courtyard — the other boys, the loose hours, the first cigarettes and the first drink and the slow drift into the kind of company a mother lies awake over. She did not want that company for me, and the art school stood between me and it, and so the art school was where I would stay.

She was right about all of it. The boys I knew at the easels were decent, and they were a far better world to spend an afternoon in than the courtyard. The newcomer and I were friends; we walked to the art school together and talked as we went. It was simply that my fire had no part in her reasons, and by then it had almost gone quiet, and neither of us knew it. My mother sincerely believed I was still learning art, and from time to time she reminded me of it. I only half sensed what I see clearly now: the school had quietly stopped being a place I went to learn and become a place I went to be kept safe. And as a place to be kept safe, it worked.

So I stayed. I went by habit, but I went: five days a week, missing lessons only when I was ill. I finished when I was in the ninth year of the ordinary school — ten years, all told, from the small boy who liked to draw to the adolescent who could not wait to be done. When it ended I did not feel any loss. I felt an enormous relief, a weight going off my shoulders, a sudden largeness in the ordinary day where the thing I had to do was no longer there.

In the same childhood, in the same town, I was learning one more thing — programming, which had just taken hold of me — and the person who taught me that one did the opposite of the finishing touch. Where the art school gave me an example, this other teacher, at the one moment it mattered, took the example away. That is the next part. It is the same boy, the same years, seen from the other side.