My Painting Class

I wanted to find out what painting was like, so one semester in college I registered for a painting class. They gave us a ditto with a list of stuff to buy and I took it downtown to the art store, and we learned how to stretch canvasses and all that other stuff, and then we started painting.

Here's a complete list of my artistic output from that course, in approximate chronological order:

People always seemed to like Still Life 1 the best, which bothered me because that was the one I painted when I didn't know what I was doing. I improved a lot as far as being able to put what I wanted onto the canvas, but it seemed people weren't interested in what I wanted to put there. Apparently I've got more of a writer's sort of brain.

So I didn't come back the next semester, partly because the class with the professor I liked didn't fit into my schedule.

I made up funny mental names for the other people in the class. There was Sorority Girl, who I seem to remember was actually pretty good but too close to the house-in-the-Hamptons to do anything with it, and would probably end up using the aesthetic sense we were learning to pick tasteful designer outfits for giving artfully color-schemed sales presentations with.

There was also Frat Boy, whose ideas of art, dulled by living among a thousand posters of Lamborghinis and beer-commercial bikini models, never rose above the commercial garbage that Patrick Nagel does. (Ever seen any of that stuff? Ick! Woman as cardboard cutout; lame, lame, lame.)

And there was Weird Skinny Chick, who was really incredibly thin, almost anorexic, but she seemed healthy enough otherwise so I just figured she happened to get born that way. We are all as Nature made us.

So when the live model showed up at the end of the semester, naturally in my mind he became "Nude Dude".

There wasn't much discipline in my art class. Basically, you had to show up and hang around for the whole time (so he could talk to you), and you had to produce paintings (so there was something to talk about). Sometimes the teacher would come around and look at your painting, and he'd say stuff about it that he liked and stuff that he didn't, and if you disagreed with him you were free to do so but you had to say why.

Once he asked me why I'd painted a little vase as maroon when on the table it was white. I said, "Because it looked better that way." He laughed heartily and said, "Well, I guess that's about the best reason you could come up with!"

I was later to enshrine this as the First Principle Of LEGO Engineering.

You could go paint in the evenings too if you felt like it. I used to complain because a painting wasn't like a programming project -- you can't tell when it's finished! If the program works and you have it all documented, you're done, but a painting is non-deterministic! It has no verifiable signs of completion! My painting teacher said something like, "Well, maybe that's true, but it's probably not finished if you haven't covered up the whole canvas," and pointed to the large empty areas I had left.

I would later decide a painting was finished if:

  1. All the objects looked about like I thought they were supposed to
  2. I was really tired of looking at it.
This is in contrast to the Second Principle of Lego Engineering, which is:
Final Completion is for the lazy. Even if you run out of pieces you can always take some off one place and put them back on another place.
Lego is a lot like writing on my Web page, but I don't change things much here once I've written them. I think that's probably because most of the writing practice I have comes from doing E-mail, where you write it down and bang it into pretty good shape, but the clock is always ticking. If you're writing E-mail, in some sense you're always under deadline; a fresh message today is worth eighty stale ones tomorrow.

I enjoyed oil painting, but English is a lot more convenient and neither drips all over your pants nor requires smelly turpentine.

Daniel F. Boyd / cs@buffalo.edu
Last modified: Fri Jun 28 16:00:51 1996