English Major Beginning

So there I was, baking in the open Zocalo, gulping at my Corona Familiar, trying to draw a church in front of me. My sketchbook, covered in condensation rings was mostly empty. After a week in Mexico I had maybe ten pages of imagery. The assignment was to have one-hundred pages of sketches portraying the surrounding town. With only a few days left until my first fifty were due, I was halfheartedly sketching anything I could find- the equivalent, I thought, of artistic bullshitting.

During my sophomore year at MSU I had impulsively signed up for a two week trip to a city in the heart of Mexico called Oaxaca (pronounced WAH-HAH-KAH). I was never very dedicated to my art degree and my wandering attitude reflected this. So when I walked on that plane boarding for Oaxaca, it was just as accidental as a sky falling on a chicken.

Packed with shops and churches, the town has a liveliness that feels like those moments at the end of a wedding where everyone is drunk and dancing and no one has a care in the world. It also shows its age. Rusted edges appear on all the metal surfaces, and a thin layer of dust has settled on the rusted siding of the shanties that sit between the 50's coke machines and open-air shops. Aged but not tired, Oaxaca's people walked with high chins and seemed to all have something to sell. There were half-a-dozen carts on each block selling anything from mayonnaise covered corn cobs to Hunter S. Thompson hats and clay cigarette holders.

Oaxaca spread across a wide valley; in one direction, groups of shanties were stacked up a hill. In another, the town opened up into neighborhoods and small businesses, exposing areas where the ground was a hard bed of dry clay. In these parts, the high sun had leeched all the moisture from the ground.

The city owed its artistic soul to this soil. When mixed with water, the clay became easily malleable but still resistant to separation. This made it perfect for sculpting into all manner of practical containers and expressive art pieces. These ceramic works were the reason a bunch of MSU students had been flown to Oaxaca.

Exploring numerous studios belonging to Oaxaceno artisans, we saw techniques that had been fashioned by hundreds of years of tradition and pots that still sold for top peso. Switching between sculpture and drawing, the professors urged us to cultivate a sensitivity to our rich surroundings.

At night, We would dine in Oaxaca's restaurants, enjoying Gorgonzola on Wraps filled with chicken marinaded in bittersweet oils. Afterward, the group would head to local bars and take shots of a Mexican liquor called Mescal. Drawing, dining, eating, and Sculpting: It seemed like an excellent way to spend a few weeks.

However, something seemed off. I couldn't get into the sketching, the art of the whole thing.

After the first five days, during the weekend our professors gave us, I started taking afternoon walks through the city. Just letting myself get lost, probably looking like a tourist begging to be mugged. That may have been a cool story. I found my eye picking things up but my feet felt no need to stop. There was no urge to draw. I wanted to just walk around my surroundings, take it all in.

Carrying a sketchbook around is a necessary part of artistic lives. It is the physical manifestation of the memory, less restrictive than notebooks, a collection of blank pages, each page constructed for easy scribing, woven in such a way to collect ink easier than the usual college ruled dross.

So there I was, baking in the open Zocalo, gulping at my Corona Familiar, trying to draw a church in front of me. I dropped my hand to the paper and stared at the building in front of me. My hand began tracing the crude shape of a contour sketch. It wasn't doing anything for me. I didn't care. I was wasting graphite and ink. My picture came out looking like a melting grizzly bear being beaten to death by the Pope. This could have been compelling if it had been my intent.

Stopping out of frustration, I topped off my drink and stared at the church. Its focal point, a white faced clock with gold Roman Numerals and hash marks, was housed in a rectangular box structure outlined by white columns. From here, the edges of the tower converged into a sharp tip about six stories above the street level. Frustrated with the drawing, I began writing down my observations. Where words didn't suffice, I drew. My sketchbook quickly went from being a collection of pictures to a visual journal of my experiences. Fifty pages became one-hundred became two full books. I kept it in the trunk of my car for those times when I was on the road, sitting in n a roadside diner overlooking the highway, eating a lonely meal. I left it in a Jamestown ND Applebee's during a trip to Minneapolis.

On a hot day in Mexico, I realized that I liked to use words to describe things as much as lines and colors and tones. At one point, the group visited a ceramicist named Dorras Porras (sp?) who was legendary in the area for her handmade mezcal pots. I drew her and wrote down what she did. When one of my peers saw this he tore the book from my hands and read what I had written. He liked it. More importantly, he understood it. That was a neat moment when I realized that I could write in a semi-sensical way.

I figure with surroundings as rich as Oaxaca it's only a matter of time before someone figures out something about being creative. Anyway, now it's just a matter of trying to perceive my world such that everywhere becomes as alive and dynamic as Oaxaca.

The professor complained in the comments that I didn't draw enough in the book. I started to realize that I was in the wrong major.

I suppose this isn't really an epiphany. This is when the seed for my English Major epiphany was planted. I suspect that the actual epiphany occurred sometime during a sleepless night over a muddy canvas or in an advisor's office in Bozeman. I figure that this one is more fun since it takes place in Mexico and involves alcohol.