best advice

Penelope; with endless energy and abounding inspiration, has provided us with yet another cool project (I swear if it wasn’t for her I’d be sitting on the couch every night eating and not blinking at the tv). This weekend she launched the final product for ‘The Best Advice I Ever Got’ gallery. Check it out, it’s great. There’s loads of valuable advice in there, and of course some very special illustrations as usual.

I submitted an entry with some personal advice I got years ago, that I’ve never forgotten…
(Insert sound of harp playing up and down scale of notes. Screen wobbles in big waves. Transition to flash-back)

Scene: Teenage Flossy in art class at high school, 1994.

All the way through high school I had amazing art teachers, people who actually still made art in their own time, and who were wise and very talented. Then in my last year a new teacher came who somehow landed the ‘head of the art department’ role, and ended up teaching our class. He was hopeless. I won’t go into the details, well maybe just a few…
Annoying traits of my final year art teacher:
1) We would get to class and he wouldn’t be there. We’d have to wait 20 mins for him to arrive and let us into the classroom, then only have 10 mins to get stuff done before the end of class.
2) We’d get to class and he had nothing prepared. We’d then have to put in an order of stuff we needed; “Yellow paint please sir”, “Glue please sir”, “Brushes please sir” etc. He’d head off to the storeroom with the order and never return. We used to joke about the black hole in the corridor that must have sucked him into another dimension. We secretly wished it was true and he would never return.
3) One day we got so sick of waiting for him we formed a small but determined vigilante group to track and hunt him down. He was found playing ping-pong in the teachers common room.
4) He had no talent, no skill, and his knowledge of artists was limited to a 20 year block in Australia in the early 1900’s
5) Then there was that patronising laugh when we asked him a question about something we didn’t know (and neither did he apparently).

In summation he was not the teacher you wanted to end up with in the final year, especially when the only reason for staying at school was to get into ‘fine arts’ at university after I left. Eventually I boycotted. As a frustrated classroom refugee I turned up at the art room next door, to a teacher I’d had the previous year. I crashed his year 9 class and spent the rest of my year there.

He was a brilliant artists and teacher.

The only thing was that he begged me not to go to art school. He said it would only do damage and that everyone came out the other side remodelled into creating all the same stuff, leaving no originality. I was feisty, determined and didn’t believe him, and he knew that. One day while watching me quickly sketch something down, explaining one of my ideas, he interrupted…

“I love the way you draw. At art school, don’t whatever you do, let them change that. They will try, but don’t let them change the way you draw.”

But if you recall I was feisty, determined and didn’t believe him.

The following year at art school my first drawing teacher said “Step back step back, you’re suppose to be drawing, not scrubbing!”

Eventually, even with my art teachers warning in my mind, they broke me down, I emerged from uni with no originality remaining. Learning to believe that what you draw, paint, write, create, etc, is any good, takes a long time. It takes hardly any time to undo that. I did very well at uni, I was given very high marks, was offered Honours, and was given an award, but I couldn’t wait for it to end. It did damage that has taken me years to rebuild, but my school teachers’ advice is still with me, and his faith in me is what’s helping to guide me back.

Lots of lessons there:
Be true to yourself. Don’t let people make you believe you’re wrong. Have faith. Don’t give up.

Take what you will.