self portrait colored pencil, originally uploaded by robayre.
Here is my Archive Friday contribution. My first reaction finding this in an old sketchbook was “awesome, this is definitely my friday archive piece” but looking more and more at it, it makes me kind of ill. The face is so asymmetrical and my eyes are too far apart, or are they too close? At any rate, I decided to keep it remembering that it was just something that I did very quickly so of course it will be far from perfect. Here is a link to other self portriats I’ve done, mostly photographs, so that you can judge for yourself. I think the reason I like this drawing so much is it’s bold use of color. I used to be such a light drawer that many of my high school assigned art pieces are no longer visable because the graphite was so light it just wore away over time.
When I see this picture I am immediately taken back to a different time.
From the fall of 2002 till the summer of 2004 I was on hiatus from graphic design and took a job as an aide at the local middle school. I like to say that I taught study hall. Yes, taught. I was supposedly replacing an aide who would let the students stand on desks, scream and destroy classrooms. I was coming out of my experience in art education (a year and a half of college classes) and had been working at my Sunday nursery job for 7 years. I kept the class very organized and the students were required to work on homework. If they didn’t have any homework, they must bring a book to read or artwork to work on that would keep them quiet and from disrupting the rest of the class. I was happy to encourage them to draw and carried around colored pencils and paper for them to draw on. Sometimes I would even create coloring book style pages for them to draw on that began to come into demand.
The students would stand in line for help on their studies and I would help them tackle anything from multiplying fractions to understanding their 7th grade science (which I can’t for the life of me remember what was in the curriculum at the time). If they were well behaved they were allowed five minutes at the end of the hour to quietly socialize. I learned a very important thing about education at this point. Book education is important and the reason why they are going to school, but social education (learning how to become members of society) is what they are geared towards. As much as we teachers would try and keep them from socializing, it actually is very important part of their education at this point. They are very much like sponges, taking in all things social and society. It is very important because at this age they are really at a stage of formation to who they will become as adults. Despite the creases in my forehead (I perfected the teacher glare that shuts a kid up with just a glance) and the piddles of paychecks, I really did enjoy this job. 1. It was incredibly low stress. 2. It granted me loads of time to work on whatever I wanted. Whether it be reading my own books, drawing or knitting, I got paid while I worked on my favorite things. My sketchbooks from that time are just filled with so much inspiration. The pages are brimming with ideas, journaling, and lots of drawings and sketches. I found quite a few drawings of my students’ faces (that I drew while they had no idea I was drawing them). I’d draw empty classroom desks, or schoolbooks and materials. This particular drawing I did is a self portrait, that I did during my first hour class. I think I had taken a camera phone picture of myself on the way to work and drew it from off of my little phone.
While I worked at the middle school I felt pretty ashamed that I, a college graduate, was working this aide position, which is normally held by uneducated people, hence the low salary. I really, really wanted to get back into graphic design so that I could again hold my head high and return to a productive career. After I secured my current job, one thing that I was surprised to miss about the aide job, and was a bit of a hard habit to break, was being able to write/draw whenever the urge hit me during the workday.
I guess that is all that comes to me when I see this self-portrait. I just think of the era that I had kids calling me “Mrs. Wells” even though I was unmarried :)
