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3:24 a.m. - 2022-09-26
lesson 1
Mr. Renfrow was stout, w/thick glasses and a face built for a mustache. He was, like all of my instructors, embarrassingly well-credentialed. I wouldn't realize this 'til after I'd graduated, when I was considering post-grad options and looked up all their CVs. This wasn't because our regional university was an elite destination or anything--just a reflection of how top-heavy the talent pool is in a field where teaching is one of the few gigs w/a steady paycheck. But, like everyone else in the department (save the Chair) he eschewed the “Dr.” honorific. Which I think speaks to the workman-like nature of the studio arts. I only saw Renfrow twice without his denim, pigment-crusted painter's apron: once at my commencement in his tam and regalia and once at a faculty exhibition, looking uncomfortable in a tweed blazer. He moved around the studio with unhurried deliberation, and to say he was even-tempered would be to imply he had one.
The assignment was simple: find a landscape on campus, rough it in en plein air and finish the painting in the studio. Our university couldn't boast of any grandiose scenery, but it had been built in a handsome-enough Spanish Revival style. So I posted up beneath a vaulted colonnade, with a view towards the red tiled roof and cupola of an adjoining structure. A cupola is a Spanish bell tower, essentially, and shape-wise there was a lot going on with this one. So much so that, when I got back to the studio I sort of obsessed over it. The closer I got to a solid representation, the more convinced I was that I could improve upon it. Painting and repainting the damn thing as the finish line retreated in kind. In fact, the other students were already prepping for the next assignment (we stretched our own canvases) when Renfrow, toting a gallon of white gesso primer, stopped by my easel. “Having some difficulty?”
I proceeded to elaborate on the challenges of representing a convex bell-roof and the nuance of light caught across opposing turret arches, etc. He nodded sympathetically, pulling a large flat-head brush from his apron. Then he loaded the bristles with a generous charge of gesso and, holding the brush like a conductor's baton, painted the cupola out of existence. “Take the rest of the day off Mr. Ernst, I'll see you Thursday morning.”
I haven't painted on canvas since I graduated, but this lesson in composition endures and I've applied it to creative endeavors, across fields, ever since--every detail exists in service of the whole. And it seemed obvious to me when I returned that Thursday morning, what I'd been ignoring; a bright splash of blooming bougainvillaea, the sweep of a mesquite tree, the rhythmic shadows cast by the colonnade. I can't even remember if I painted that damn cupola back in...
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