Each morning, Francesco, Rachel, and I took a tram to a basement studio to have art instruction from 9 to noon. Monday was clay, Tuesday film animation, Wednesday collage, Thursday and Friday drawing and painting. The Artbreak brochure explains that this structure “was inspired by university research findings—that creative expression, learning, and a supportive community are the master keys to happiness. Morning at Artbreak is not a ‘master class’ for professional artists but a chance for ordinary people to relish the catharsis and fun of artistic expression.”
Back home, the most I hope for out of the morning is enough coffee to keep me conscious for the rest of the day, so “the master keys to happiness” and the “catharsis” of “artistic expression” promised to be a significant upgrade. Our studio was called Muddum, which means mud house, and it was run by Klara Dodds, a young Czech ceramicist. The first morning, she placed a slab of clay before each of us, and then she tied blindfolds across our eyes. We were to sculpt a mask of our own face by touch alone.
Francesco said he first felt the pull of art when, bored in a graduate-school lecture, he made a sketch of the teacher. Besides his art vacations, he now takes art classes two evenings a week. He recommended the book Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain, because the exercises help to turn off your judgmental, rational left side and allow access to the creative right side. It was a best-seller in 1979, and I bought a copy at the time. I think I still have it somewhere in a box of books I never got around to unpacking. That seems like a metaphor for my artistic ability: buried at the bottom of a forgotten box.
Because we couldn’t see what we were doing, Klara’s exercise shut up the voice that says, “That looks terrible.” An hour sped by, and we took off our blindfolds and laughed at our ridiculous, lumpy portraits. Next, to the sounds of mournful Czech accordion music, we were given another slab and allowed to sculpt ourselves while looking at our work.
As an adult, whenever I’ve undertaken an art project, the two halves of my brain have gone to war. One side celebrates the sense of losing yourself in the act of creation; time falls away, your hands and mind feel connected. The other internal voice complains that this is a waste of time. If I want a pot, or a painting, or an afghan (I once took two years and invested a fortune in yarn to knit my own), this left side says, I can easily purchase a more aesthetically pleasing version.
At Muddum, as I pressed and pounded the clay, I had to keep telling Lefty to shut up and let me work. At noon, I had a misshapen but faintly recognizable self-portrait. Prague beckoned through the window, but I was happy that I’d spent the morning making something.
The next day, our instructor was Sylvie Peeters, a 22-year-old Belgian language student who was contemplating art school. Our project was to make a stop-action animated film—our own Fantastic Mr. Fox. Oddly, a few days earlier, I had been to my daughter’s middle school to observe classes during an open house. One was computer animation, and I became annoyed as she sat at a desk and repeatedly clicked on a mouse to make a little film. Painting class had been full, so here she was spending even more time on the computer. I worried than our film would be an equally silly exercise.
On the floor was a large piece of black paper, and over it a camera was mounted on a tripod. The three of us then got on the floor and covered the paper with flour. The idea was that we would push around the flour with our fingers and make dozens of little “drawings” that when seen together—as in a flip book—would produce action. Already this was more tactile and fun than my daughter’s sterile class (although I could see the disadvantages to having 30 middle-schoolers covering a room with flour).
We divided the paper into three sections, so each of us could pursue our directorial ambitions. I planned to make an animation of a cat grooming itself and wagging its tail. But like so many auteurs constrained by time and budget, my final film consisted of the head of a cat that extended its tongue. Surrealism flourished in prewar Prague, and when Sylvie stuck our finished film in the computer for its premiere, I thought our triptych was an appropriate hommage.
At the end of the week, we worked with Siberian-born artist Tatiana Irbis. She explained that when she was a young art student in the Soviet Union, she couldn’t get her hands on anything but black paint. As a result, she specializes in techniques using bold, black lines. We made pencil sketches of Richard, our Artbreak host, on a thick poster-board material. Next, Tatiana had us incise our pencil lines with a small knife; then we squeezed black and blue paint mixed with vegetable oil onto the drawings and rubbed the whole mess with a rag. The ink sank into the marks, and the poster board took on a metallic sheen—a poor man’s engraving! I was surprised at how good my portrait looked. It was as if decades had fallen away, and I was back to where I had left off before I dropped art altogether.
The next day, I decided to do another incised portrait, so I started a pencil drawing of Franz Kafka. I got so absorbed that I spent the full three hours sketching, while Rachel made an abstract painting inspired by Prague’s cobblestones, and Francesco did a tempera landscape of a bird’s eye view of Prague that was better than anything we later saw at the National Gallery.
At the end of a week of art classes, I can’t say that I achieved catharsis, or even that I found the keys to happiness. But I agreed with Churchill’s admonition for the later-in-life painter, “We cannot aspire to masterpieces. We may content ourselves with a joy ride in a paint box.”
