I was in a sour mood when I got home from school. I was studying art at Community College. The night before, I was up all night working on a large design assignment for my Black and White Design class. It was to be 20" x 30" according to the assignment instructions, and done in pen and ink, based on an assigned photograph. The assignment was an exercise in absolute black and white composition. It was preceded by smaller in-class assignments that were designed to teach us the use of black and white space with varying percentages of black and white respectively. In amounts of 25%, 50%, and 75%, we were to create a composition that effectively hid the respective minority or majority of the black or white space in each design. I screwed the pooch across the board. Utter and complete FAIL! I should have seen how I did in that set of assignments as a harbinger of what was to come.
All of the students' work was hung on the classroom wall and evaluated one by one. When the teacher got to mine, it was like a beheading with a dull axe. I was frustrated beyond words. All that work for nothing. And to think, I was so confident, sitting up all night working on that disaster. I had never been so focused on anything for that amount of time. This thoroughly convinced me that all my efforts to do well were pointless. To this day I don't know what kept me from dropping that class.
After that life-sucking disaster, we received the next assignment in our instruction on the use of black and white composition. This time, gradation was involved. Though I was so busy wallowing in my frustration and disappointment from the last assignment, I remember feeling a bit relieved about the use of gradation in the assignment. It was the one thing about it that I knew I could do well. But, as our approach toward the composition was to be somewhat the same as the percentage assignments, I was not encouraged. At all. I felt destined to fail.
The gradation assignment required a pair of smaller designs. One was to be a composition totally of our own making, inspired by our own imagination. The other was to be based on another photograph assigned by the instructor. My approach to completing the assignment was totally opposite to what I did for the previous assignment. I went in to the back room where the VCR was (yes, this was a long time ago), set up a couple of TV tables, put on a movie, and started work. I was able to handle the gradation part of the assignment almost in my sleep, so, that was no problem at all. As for the design composition, I only devoted enough of my brain to work the pencils and china marker properly. The rest of my head was into the movie I was watching. The assignment required the work to be done on sheets of 20" x 20" illustration board. I watched two movies. At some point I stopped for a snack. Before the second movie ended I finished the assignment. Both designs. I was barely aware of what I did. And I didn't care. As far as I was concerned, this assignment was destined to failure. I knew that my execution of the gradation in the designs was good, but you couldn't convince me at gunpoint that I wasn't going to fail the design composition part of the assignment. My feeling was that, if my getting ripped a new one was inevitable, I might as well enjoy the ride. Plus, I wasn't going to waste an entire night on that assignment just to be handed my ego in pieces. I even managed to enjoy doing the work (as much of it as I was paying attention to).
The next day, after a proper night's sleep, I brought in my assignment for evaluation. Everyone's work was hung up on the wall for individual critique by the instructor. Mine was on the end. The instructor started on the opposite end of the wall so that mine would be last. One by one, the instructor ripped into the designs. He was taking no prisoners. You could hear the sound of egos and expectations shattering on the floor. As he got closer and closer to mine, I just waited for what I thought was inevitable. Everyone else, as I had overheard in conversation among the students before the review, had put a lot of thought and effort into their work. I did mine virtually blindfolded and totally unconcerned. I wouldn't have been a bit surprised it he decided to eject me from the room. Moment of truth; the instructor finally got to mine. I braced myself. He shifted gears so hard you could almost hear it. The first words out of his mouth were nothing but praise. He was elated. He went on in detail about what he liked about my designs. And the thing that really blew me away was that he thought I spent an absorbitant amount of time and thought on the assignment. I think he mentioned it three or four times To this day, I don't know how he managed to miss the raw shock on my face. Jaw hanging open, I sat and stared, entranced. I couldn't believe my ears. He loved both of them. He had nothing at all bad to say about them. I said nothing in response to anything he said. I was praying he didn't ask me any details. I just nodded when he looked at me. After he finished the review, it took me a few moments to recover. I looked over at the other students. I saw those closest to me looking at me. I was speachless. One noticed the shock on my face. "You didn't think about this assignment at all, did you?" All I could do was quietly shake my head no.
The fact that I spent so much time and effort on the previous assignment and failed, only to pass a similar assignment almost totally without effort, expecting to fail miserably, and passing with flying colors, disturbed me profoundly. I was used to having little control over what happened in my classes, but this was just too much. After that year, I changed my major to computer science.
Though I decided to pursue a different career path, I didn't stop drawing. I did more gradation designs (this time just for the fun of it). I remembered liking the effect of the opposing gradations adjacent to each other. I still do them as exercises from time to time. Sometimes, when I get a design just right, I find it hard to look away. At that point, I guess it's not just an exercise anymore.
