Pride & Prejudice

"Oh... wait a minute. I wanted to take a look at your drawing."

The rushed words caught me by surprise. I had started to pack my bags, relieved to be done with school for the day and very much looking forward to Tuesday night television. I touched the pause button on my iPod which immediately quenched the sounds of music -- I don't remember what I was listening to -- and I slowly revolved on the spot, searching with my tired eyes to find my professor, who I was surprised to find right next to me, staring hard at my charcoal labor of love that I had lost myself in for the previous two hours.

He didn't return my gaze.

I glanced at the clock, which informed me that my classmates had emptied out of the room and into the dreary night a good five minutes ago. Silently fuming, I turned back to my teacher, who continued to study my drawing and spoke more to himself than to me. "See, what we're trying to accomplish here..."

He ripped apart my work for a good ten minutes. After ignoring me the entire class period, which I was truthfully rather okay with given a rather distasteful run-in the week prior, he had finally decided to acknowledge the presence of my "rushed" and "disproportionate" drawing. I patiently listened to his criticism, soaking it in and making mental notes of how to adjust my homework accordingly, and tried very hard not to think of the bus that was surely whizzing by the school that very minute. The bus that I was not on.

See, I could have interrupted his reverie and rushed out to catch my ride home. In the cold and drizzle that is so yucky for Laguna Beach, this option seemed quite fruitful. But I needed this critique. I needed to know how to improve my work. Daddy and I are not paying for a steep art school education to catch buses. Better to stay at the school overnight. Even if it meant missing a brand new episode of LOST. Missed buses might not mean much to you, ye reader, but my life revolves around the bus system. Concerned about the environment? Nah, not really at all to be honest; my eyeballs and I are just a hazard to the road. Consider yourself not in danger of being featured on the next Red Asphalt series.

Tonight, I marched into the same classroom, trying not to be peeved at the very sight of my irksome professor, whom I had admittedly begun to loathe at an alarming rate. While setting up my drawing and sharpening my charcoal, minding my own business, I turned to find him lingering. How annoying. I could tell he was itching to tell me more about my disastrous drawing without trying to make his intentions too obvious. Hiding my misgivings, I asked him, "So, did you want me to redo all of these lines or just progress from here?"

He began to -- there's no mistaking it -- eagerly pour his obvious wealth of knowledge into me. It was important to him that I understood exactly what he wanted to me to grasp. Prideful and stubborn, insensitive and repetitive, this man that LCAD has employed to educate me truly wanted to make a difference in my art tonight... my art, the most important thing in my life. The drawing sucked. He knew it, and maybe a little voice inside of me had known it all along as well. But he worked with me. Patiently. As I watched and listened, nodding when he shot me deeply inquisitive looks to see if anything was sinking in, my distaste for the man melted away into the charcoal sodden floor beneath our feet. Here was a person whose personality clashed with mine like a hangover and Monday morning, but our shared adoration for showing others the beauty we discern united us. As he continued to teach me the techniques that he so fawned over, he mentioned other artists that had operated in the same vein... one of which being William Merritt Chase.

Chase?!

I happen to have spent a year of my life replicating one of Chase's most well known paintings, "Idle Hours". I have always felt a connection with the Impressionist artists of the 20th century whose enchanting works I have copied so many of, but this painting was always, inexplicably and yet so understandably, the most special to me. I poured myself into it, making it perfect, and it remains to this day the only painting of mine that has followed me everywhere I've moved, lovingly hung on a wall near my bed. I will never sell it. I am rarely proud of my own work, but even to this day I consider "Idle Hours" one of my stronger pieces.

I know a certain professor that would be proud.