The Brooklyn Rail

Graham Nickson, the Dean of the New York Studio School, was an intense painter and pedagogue. His recent death led me to recall two very different experiences of Graham, twenty-five years apart, and to record a few of his surprising words.

One of the euphoric events of my life happened in 1998 when I took part in the New York Studio School’s renowned Drawing Marathon—a two-week–long life-drawing ordeal with breaks only for sleeping, eating, and crits. In that time, Graham Nickson prodded us to see accurately but feelingly, to fill our gigantic sheets of paper corner to corner, marking our passage through space and time (including dead ends). The unspoken motto: “I was here, and my eyes were open.”

I loved the physicality of it all—the high-ceilinged atelier in the original Whitney building on 8th Street, the charcoal dust, the models composing themselves before a sea of eyes, the bizarre set-ups that Graham tortured us with. I loved watching my fellow marathoners wrestle huge sheets of paper onto the wall, struggle to make marks that mattered, then cut them up at Graham's behest and put them together again, only better. I loved how everyone in the studio had, just by virtue of standing in different places (and having different eyes), different perspectives. I loved the rambling crits that went past midnight in which Graham related our drawings to those of Cézanne and Piero della Francesca, Rembrandt and Giacometti. It was wonderful chaos that somehow connected us with the great masters. As I wrote in a piece about it for the New York Times, it was a “moral education” full of sin and repentance, hubris and humiliation.

Imagine my thrill, then, when Nickson proposed toward the tail-end of COVID-19 that I try a second marathon. Climb Mount Everest twice? Sure! This time, I learned, the marathon would only be five days. And there was a catch: it would be virtual only. The models, teachers, students, and crits would be on Zoom alone. Honestly, it sounded awful. 

But I said yes (of course), and bought the supplies—sheets of large paper, charcoal, masking tape, erasers. I also dug up two items we were asked to bring: the earliest drawing we’d ever made or could find and a photograph of our childhood selves. Thus armed, I clicked “Join Meeting.”

Graham (the students called him by his first name) acknowledged the oddity of the situation. “We will all think about all the things that are missing,” he said. For instance, it doesn't matter where you stand; every student will have the same view of the model on the screen. But virtual space has one great advantage: “It’s already flattened out for you.” (Yay?) And in the absence of actual space, other forces will fill the vacuum: mystery and memory. (No empty space!) Anyway, he noted, all drawings, whether from life, memory, or imagination, are just “metaphors of experience,” not experience itself. The drawings we’d make, he promised, would reveal ourselves to ourselves.

Then he told us a story about French fries to make us feel better. One day, he ordered some fish and chips at a restaurant. Without thinking, he salted his chips—or at least he thought he did. Turns out he’d poured sugar on them. When he realized his mistake, he wanted to sneak out, but instead he ate the sugared fries and fish “with fervor and bravado.” After that, whenever he made a mark he didn’t like, he’d decide to enjoy it, build on it. Instead of thinking, “I’m eating fish and chips with sugar,” he’d think, “I’ve invented a new world.”

With visions of sugar-fries dancing in our heads, we began our first exercise. The model, clothed and visible only from the shoulders up, popped up on our screens. She had pink hair and pink nails and was surrounded by a nightmarish collection of dolls staring out from a glass cabinet. As I started to make my marks, I noticed a tiny window of myself at the top of my screen. I couldn’t click it away. Should I ignore it or put that tiny self-portrait in? What would Velázquez do? He’d totally put it in! I was getting into the virtuality of it all.

The next day, we each brought in our childhood photos. Mine was a picture of me at age one. I was wearing a pinafore onesie, tottering outside near some bushes in front of a wood-paneled garage wall on a summer day. My tongue was sticking out, and my eyes were sparkling. Our task? To copy our photos on a tiny piece of paper, six inches square. I rushed through my rendering of the bushes (a bunch of poofy marks) and the wood-paneled garage (stripes going up and out), making sure to cover the corners of the paper, as Graham liked. What I obsessed over was the tongue in my mouth and the sparkling eyes. I wanted to draw eagerness itself. I was working from the inside out.

This labor was lost on Graham. What he liked best were the elements I’d dashed off—the wood paneling (which put him in mind of Frank Stella), the bushes (Cy Twombly), and the triangle in the crook of my right arm. Remember, he said, “Matisse was not a painter of things but of the spaces between things.” 

On day three, Graham told us we would be starting “the drawing you’ve always wanted to make.” We were to take our youthful drawing and make a huge version of it, 60 by 66 inches. The pen-and-ink sketch I’d brought in showed a sad elf in a snowstorm. I’d made it after my fifth-grade teacher, on discovering I was Jewish, asked me to stop drawing Santa Claus. Although I was fairly proud of it back then, I did not feel great about it anymore, especially not after seeing what Balthus and Dürer had done at a similar age.

Still, I did as I was told. Then came the next instruction: on top of this huge picture, we were to draw, once again, the photograph of ourselves as children. That was bad enough. Even worse was the afternoon’s activity—doing just the opposite. Take a large drawing of our childhood photo, which by this time I referred to as “Eager Me,” and on top of that, draw a version of our childhood drawing, in my case, “Sad Elf.”

Graham promised that the ghosts from the underdrawing would haunt our new drawing, and he was right. Bushes from the photograph turned into tumbleweeds that floated into the sky, wooden beams that ran up the side of the wall became leafless trees, and the elf's bag of toys became a giant pulsating tribble. The summer scene was now a snowstorm. And eager me had become a crazy elf in clogs. It all made me laugh out loud, but it wasn’t good. I suspected Graham would not be pleased.

I was right. He called my drawing “charming,” which, as far as I know, is not really one of his praise words. He told me to nail down the corners of the composition. What about adding an animal coming in from the lower left? That seemed bizarre advice coming from an artist known for his fierce observation. (More cowbells?) But then, thinking of Balthus’s cartoony black cat, Mitsou, I scribbled in a little black wolf threatening my crazed Dutch girl. Graham was right. It helped.

By day four, the wheat was separating from the chaff. Some of my fellow marathoners, especially those schooled before by Graham, were very good indeed. A photo of a horse and rider was transformed into a hunting scene worthy of Degas. A picture of an angry child sitting on a milk crate near a gnarly tree sent Graham searching for a Bonnard. A pillow on a chair was haunted by the figure of Punchinello (Dürer! Tiepolo! Goya!) How about my Sad Elf merged with Eager Me? Graham praised the huge snowballs falling from the sky, which mostly filled the page. Well, that was something.

Finally, the last day was upon us. Our finished drawings would reveal our innermost selves. I added more snow everywhere because that was the only thing that was working for me. A passage from James Joyce’s Dubliners drifted into my mind as I worked: “Yes, the newspapers were right: snow was general all over Ireland.” In my desperate blizzard, I could see the gods of drawing, the names that had been invoked for the past week, laughing. That evening, I went to bed, leaving the monstrous picture of myself on the wall. In the middle of the night, I heard a rustle and then a soft rolling thunder near where I had been laboring for the last five days. It was my scroll, the mystery of my life, falling off the wall.