Drawing with Barbara Grossman - Minwoo Han
In my art education before coming to Mount Gretna, drawing had belonged to a different realm than painting. In every aspect they were “misaligned”: drawing was the doodle, the crosshatch, the wild squiggles with ball pens that appeared whenever the classes got too boring; painting was the color, the composition, structure, balance, and rigor. Drawings were brutal, and candid, but hidden away under the wide of my forearm whereas paintings were hung high under bright lamps, cradled and carefully framed in exhibitions.
This crevasse between the two kept on growing as my college years went by. I only did a few “academic” drawings - “academic” in the sense of having a total composition. Perhaps a charcoal might have been used here and there in preparatory sketches, but they were, again, “preparatory” which meant I threw them away once I got my oil out. It got to the point that I had to make one solely for the MGSoA application. I had no fun doing it and that was probably obvious.
So, really, it was no surprise that I wasn’t excited about the drawing class. Not especially after Barbara Grossman walked into our studio space, wrangled around with the easels twice her height, and proclaimed that “[she] will push [us] to [our] limits for the next two weeks to come.”
Barbara was a character. She was not large, not at the very least, but her presence was felt in every corner of the Heights Community Building. One second you take your mind off of the drawing and you’ll find her right behind, beams from her eyes just hot enough to grill you without burning the paper. Her drawing sessions were rapid and intense, often having to make four to five drawings in quick succession. Even outside of class, the intensity was maintained: we once had to make fifty drawings (FIFTY!) over the weekend of the same subject. But, somehow, I was having fun. It was a different kind of fun than doodling or with quick sketches. It felt fun to tell so much with so little. They were just lines - no tones, no color - but I could communicate volume and space and guide the viewer’s eyes around.
Her lessons extended outside of her drawing classes. I started to feel the effect on my paintings. I developed a new mindset, so to say, reminding myself of Barbara’s remarks on totality and tightness.
“More legible, more total, but not tight.”
Meeting Barbara Grossman was something. She was such a cool person to hang around with. Apparently, she’s met Giacometti in person, but what’s “cooler” was how committed she was to teaching. She would spend the whole length of the 4-hour class jumping from one easel to another, examining our drawings with obsession - the healthy kind. I will end this blog post by sharing a conversation that took place in one of her “examinations.”
I was drawing and she came up to me with her blue milk-box. She stepped on it to keep her eyes level to mine, to see my paper better. “It’s too steep,” she pointed at a line, so I erased it and redrew it. Then she stopped me and smiled: “You know what you did?” She said that I drew the angled line without even looking at the still life. It was true - I just believed what she had told me. She looked straight into my eyes.
“Don’t do that,” she said, “Draw as if your life depends on it.”
For me, drawing was always the more brutal, the more informal and “hidden-away” of the two - it was always stuff in my mind that I would draw, some random scenes that would pop up, whereas in painting classes, we would scrutinize a still life, all the “negative space” (Barbara is insistent that space is NOT negative) between the figure and the chair, and so on and so forth.
(Before MGSoA) There was this gap, this crevasse between my treatment of painting and drawing. All my paintings I kept: my drawings, I don’t even know where they are. I haven’t exhibited any of my drawings, let alone share them with anyone - usually, I am busy hiding them under the wide of my forearm from the professor. Paintings, I carefully handpicked my very best for the Mount Gretna School of Art Summer Program application while drawings - sorry, Jay. (now I get it).