welcome to art for all the sketchbook skool podcast. I'm your host, Danny Gregory. I'm the. Author of a dozen or so books on art and creativity, and I'm a sketchbook artist. I'm also self-taught and never went to art school. I've barely ever even takenan art class, which, which may be curious confession for somebody who runs an art school. But I find that I meet and I teach a lot of people with ambivalent or. Even outright painful memories about their time in art classes in middle school, in high school and college. And I have my share of them too. And that's what I wanted to talk about today. The earliest art class that I can remember was when I was 10 in Lahore in Pakistan and the class was held. Under a line of tall trees along a dusty road, Willow trees or cypress, maybe They swayed overhead. I don't know. It's it's vague memory and maybe a bit improbable. Why alongside a road? I dunno, the only clear thing about it is, is a painting that I made this multicolored sunset over twisting black rocks. I painted it for my mother, who I hadn't seen in just over a year while I lived with my grandparents. And I remember it clearly because I saw it about a month ago. It hangs in the stairway down to our basement. In Mattituck, long Island it's been hanging there or in various other places that she's owned for. I don't know, half a century. My next memory was two years later in the Brenner school in Kfar Saba in Israel. Mattatiahu was the name of my art instructor and he, he also taught wood shop class. And I was an enthusiastic, but thoroughly inept, carpenter, I could never measure things attentively. And my corner joints were always out of whack. My projects were just a mess of protruding nail heads and smeared glue. I was better at art or so I thought I always liked to draw and to paint. But Mattatiahu didn't like me, maybe it's because I was a foreigner only recently, somewhat fluent in Hebrew, or maybe I had established an unshakable reputation with Mattatiahu at the carpentry work bench, or I don't know, maybe it was just an obnoxious twerp. Up one day. Assigned us a project to do at home, a painting of birds. And I was determined to redeem myself in his eyes. So I worked really, really hard on this set long into the night at the kitchen table paints and big sheet of paper. I collected reference pictures of dozens, of species of birds, and I arranged them in this, this sprawling painting of an Oasis at sunset. Flamingos and storks posed along the water's edge and sparrows and owls were ranged on tree branches and Hawks soared through the pink and purple clouds overhead. I felt like this young Audubon, when I handed it in and the following week, when handed it back, I eagerly flipped it over. To see his comments in blue poll point pen, he had written"F the assignment was birds, not landsscape. My mother and my stepfather who are both proud sixties anti-authoritarian they were majorly pissed who grades a child's artwork for Christ sake, my mother fumed, and she stormed down to the school and she lodged a protest with a principal and my grade was changed. The following week, Mattatiahu told us about a nationwide student competition for traffic safety posters. And I painted this kind of grizzly scene of a corpse sprawled across the bloody hood of a smashed car. No doubt, gritting his teeth through his congratulatory smile. Mata towel picked my work to represent the school. I didn't win the competition, but fortunately my parents didn't fight that latest in justice, teenager in Brooklyn, I attended a very progressive school. My art teacher, Paul was an ardent Marxist, and he always encouraged us to be loose and experimental, man. Don't worry about figurative bullshit. Concept concept is King. I love Paul, but he taught me a lot more about class oppression and tofu and joint rolling. Then how to actually draw the summer after junior year, I followed the example of my idol. My buddy, Eric Drucker, who the year before had gone to the summer program. And it was fantastic. We lived in campus dorms like grownups. We studied painting and drawing and printmaking, but more importantly for a 16 year old, we stayed up late. We drank loads of beer and we made out with girls. This was the mid 1970s. And I was an overly intellectual, arrogant and insecure teenager. And most of the art I made was, and Paul would have been proud of me was highly conceptual. If I could figure out a way to out-think the teacher all the better. When our design teacher asks us to use up a whole pencil in a single drawing. I had a brainstorm. I ground up a pencil and eraser into a fine dust in a sharpener. And then I painted a nude woman in rubber cement, and I used an atomizer to blow the shavings all over the painting when the teachers, so my soft. Kind of gradated image hanging along the grimy black works of my classmates. He chastised me for not doing the assignment, but when I explained my ingenious technique, he apologized publicly and my triumph was complete. Summer school proved to be another opportunity to refine my mastery of the fine art of pissing off authority and just general bullshittery. It was also the end of my art education being surrounded by the most talented kids in school, across the country at had lowered me a notch or two. I think I gave up on art at that point. And frankly, no one else seemed that at Princeton, I took some. Art history classes, but I Lafley resented having to memorize what other people said about famous art. And I don't remember being asked for my opinion of the masters. And instead I resisted the ideas of the art establishment that had in my mind, calcified the history of heart into just another academic discipline to keep professors tenured. It wasn't a very coherent critique, but I love clean to my opinion, which seemed to be the underlying point of much of my education, you know, the 20 years to accept my ignorance in fact, to embrace it these days, I'm hungry to learn about art and to saturate myself in as many different ways as I can. To explore it. I wonder what my life would be like if I'd been able to find teachers who could have kept me enthusiastic and open-minded for all these years to be less defensive, less intellectual, less, I dunno. Self-critical maybe, um, and just make art for the joy of it and explore the pleasures of self-expression. Well, this episode, isn't intended to be a commercial, but I will say that knowing about an emphasize empathizing with all the kind of complex relationships that many of us have with art and art education has helped us to create the humane and gentle way that we teach. At sketchbook school, I think all those years of struggling with a straightforward love filled brace of heart, maybe want to start again and help people to find what is really beautiful and meaningful in heart that doesn't make you feel bad. Does make you feel low. Thanks for joining me today. I'll create something new for you again next week until then I'm Danny Gregory. And this is art for all.