Particularity, Presence, Art Teaching, and Learning

by Julia Kellman

The Awful, the Particular, and the Transcendent


Years ago in a life drawing class during graduate school, for who knows what reason, I chose to focus my drawing on the model's head and not on her entire form. She was wearing an enormous and elaborate black velvet hat with yards of veiling and several large red silk roses. The combination of textures, shadows, colors, forms, and the suggestion of a story, of meaning beyond the exercise itself, drew me in I think. Using an entire large sheet of tan-colored drawing paper, soft vine charcoal, and a kneaded rubber eraser I began to draw, moving from the impossible hat to the model's high cheekbones, deep-set shadowed eyes, soft cheeks, and curved neck. Somewhere between the top of the paper (the crown of her hat) and the woman's face, however, my hand, my self, the drawing, the young woman, and the hat merged by some means outside my control. I was the act of drawing. I was the charcoal, the curved cheek, the dark eyes, the wonderful hat. There were no boundaries among us. No distances. The drawing, it seemed, drew me at the same time that it revealed an image of the model and her black velvet hat on the paper and tied me to the woman seated before me. I was exalted, transported, amazed.