Arts and Crêpes

Recently, I decided to take a drawing class here in Nouméa. Tate was nice enough to help me find one. There was a class called “modèle vivant” offered on Mondays and Wednesdays. I called the phone number listed and stumbled through a conversation with the instructor, who invited me to come join the class.

I showed up Monday night at the Centre d’Art, which, like everything in Nouméa, is located in an old prison building. Half the infrastructure here dates back to the 1800s, when this country was a huge prison colony. It’s basically France’s Australia. To get to the classroom, you actually have to pass through three giant wooden doors with cross-beams, like Lord of the Rings.

The instructor was a friendly man named Fred, who speaks no English and looks exactly like Bruce Campbell. I tried to ask him about signing up, and how much it costs, etc, but this was too difficult for either of us. He tapped another student, who explained to me that classes were offered in four-week sessions, and you could choose Monday, Wendesday, or both. (Now that I write it, that seems pretty simple. I don’t know why we had such a hard time.)

Anyway, we started our session with the “modèle vivant.” Her name was Charlotte and she was a hippie-ish French girl with dreadlocks. These, as it turns out, are really fun to draw. You’re sitting there doing a very serious, classic style drawing, and then when you get past the shoulders, your drawing is attacked by a giant squid. Maybe not everybody would like it, but I thought it was awesome.

Fred would come over periodically and offer advice on my drawing. Mostly, I had no idea what he was saying, but occasionally I’d catch a “trop petite” or “tros grand” as he pointed to different parts of the paper. It seems that I always draw the head too big, and the feet too small. This is probably some sort of fetish.

During the break, an older woman in the class gave me some advice. “You will think a woman is beautiful,” she said in English, “but as you learn to draw, you will realize she is not so beautiful.”

I think she was trying to say that classically attractive people don’t always make the best art class models. But the way it came out, she sort of made me think that learning to draw wasn’t such a good idea.

Now I’ve taken two classes, and although I don’t think my drawing has improved yet, at least I now have a stack of red pages with pictures of a French hippie.

I want to learn more, but I’m afraid that if I do, I will realize that women are not so beautiful. That would be a pretty high price to pay for learning to draw. But at least I’ll always have the giant squid.

N.B. There are no crêpes served during the art class, but that was the only title I could come up with.