Shadow Learning

I hate his classes the first few weeks, always telling me that I am doing something wrong, not telling me exactly what. His shadow hangs over my shoulder and the endless white of my paper. Waiting. I glance at the model, down to the paper, back to the model, and make my first brave marks. A wisp of hair, naked breast, shoulder. Then I quickly rub my thumb across charcoal to smear in a muscle, shape a shadow, add some depth.

"No, no!" he says, as he runs a hand through his unruly, gray hair and scurries on to the next bewildered student. He praises me the following week. "Good! good!" So the next drawing, I do the same thing, and he says, "What is that supposed to mean? Get rid of it."

Get rid of what? The mark? The whole body?

First critique, we all stand nervously silent, surrounded by a circle of eight life-size charcoal nudes that are begging for recognition--even just one word. Finally I speak.

"Lang's picture, it . . . the lines are, they are . . . neat. Like here. You can't tell if it's a breast or a roll of skin, if it's a man or woman, if it's--"

He cuts me off. "Anyone else?" Silence again.

"What's wrong?" he asks in an exasperated voice, not waiting for an answer. "This is a critique. Speak up!" More silence. He stands for a few minutes, arms crossed, then hand cupping chin, gray bushes furrowed above narrowed eyes. Thinking. We shuffle our feet, waiting. He finally looks at his watch.

"I suppose you want a break. Five minutes. Don't keep the next model waiting." He busies himself with his busyness, for he hates not moving. We go to the pop machine then out the back door to the alley for a smoke and our own private critique.

Seven minutes later, we return. The new model is busy arranging his body on the platform. On my easel I hang another piece of paper, its whiteness this time echoing to the twenty foot ceiling. I squint at the naked body: sixty-ish by the balding head and the wrinkles around the face and hands, but thirty-ish in the thin waist and the skin that tightens around muscles that bulge from arms and thighs. It all looks unnatural, like two different bodies fused together. I start drawing the bulges and the shadows of those bulges, enhanced by the artist lamps placed on both sides of the model's stand. But I can't get into the person. Eyes vacant, I sit in my chair, depressed. Ten minutes later, I am still gazing at meaningless bulges and blank paper. The shadow reappears behind my shoulder.

"Why are you just sitting?" he asks.

"I don't know," I mumble.

"Speak up, I can't hear you."

"I don't know," I repeat, slightly louder. "I don't know what you want from me. Maybe I should drop out. I'm going nowhere, drawing worse than before I started this class."

He pulls me aside, away from the other students whose easels are not quite so white-empty as mine.

"How can you possibly be drawing worse?" he replies. "What you have already learned is here." He points to my forehead. "You will not lose that. What do you want from this class? What are you here for?"

I mumble again, and he points to the door. I follow him across the hall to another room. The late afternoon sun weakly shines from a faraway window and reveals the emptiness: a few folding chairs, abandoned easels, and a cement floor littered with the fallen colors and charcoal dust of others trying so hard to be artists. He unfolds two chairs and points. I sit. He doesn't bother to turn on the light switch.

"Tell me what you want," he says. He crosses his arms and waits.

I start to talk, try to explain, but he interrupts with tangents of art history, waving Picasso and Braque in the air. His words blend into confusion while I watch his hands do the talking. Then he pauses, arms folded, and waits again. I try to explain once more, but he can't seem to keep his hands from talking. I hear more tangents and watch more passionate waving in a language I don't understand. The hands finally stop.

"Has this helped?" he asks.

"I think so," I mumble again, though I don't think so at all. The conversation ends, nothing accomplished. Or so I thought.

* * *

The next day, I stand in front of my easel, blank paper again waiting. This time the model is a woman, the plumpish type like those painted on the Sistine Chapel, all breasts, belly, and thighs, skin almost as white as my paper. I sit down, afraid to move the charcoal. Then the shadow again.

"Why are you just sitting?" he asks.

"I don't know what to do," I mumble.

"Then just sit. Sit as long as you want." He goes on to the next student.

I sit for ten minutes, and then it comes. I draw more than breasts, belly, and thighs. I draw and blend what she is: nervous hands curled around soft breasts, thighs drawn tight against wrinkled belly, ring turned backwards around the roughness of her finger, eyes vacant and half buried within the shadows that the lights do not touch. I want him to come back and look. He does not, so I roll her up and put her in the trunk of my car along with the "good, good" and the "get rid of it."

Four weeks into the semester, he gives us our first homework assignment. Graded.

"You have two choices," he says. "A portrait or a dying rose." He explains the criteria, and it is evident to us all that he prefers the dying rose.

"Have you ever watched a dying rose?" he asks, as his hands again whirl passion into the air. No one answers. He removes his eyeglasses and chews on one of the bows. Deep wrinkles emerge on his forehead as he studies our blank faces.

"Have you ever looked at a rose? Of any kind?" Feet shuffle under more blank faces.

"Well, you should," he says in a voice of resignation as he hands out the written criteria. He briefly explains the portrait assignment, then goes back to the dying rose.

"Buy it tight," he says, "and draw it each day. Erase what you have drawn but leave a shadow, and draw the next day, and the next until no shadow of life remains."

* * *

"No, this one," I say to the Tom Thumb cashier, pointing to the tightest rose as I hand over my last two dollars. My paper does not stay white for long, because no shadow is hanging over my homework. I draw the rose in redless charcoal, all the time wondering what a dying rose has to do with drawing the human figure. The following evening, my eraser carefully leaves a shadow of the rose's youthful past. For six nights, I draw its wilting, erase, draw its dying, erase again, and finally draw its death.

Six portraits and two dying roses. He paces, critiques, paces, asks for comments, gets a few, continues to pace and critique. More "goods" than before. I'm not sure about my rose, what he thinks of it. I think he is disappointed in only two roses, but not too much. He looks at his watch.

"Take a break. Come back in five minutes," he says, but the "five minutes" lacks conviction. I put my coins in the pop machine and go out the back door and around the building, away from the other students. Sometimes I just want to sit and think. The shadow falls over me and lights a cigarette.

"Your rose, it is good."

"Oh. Thank you," I mumble. Why do I always mumble when he speaks to me? I reach for my cigarettes and stare at my charcoal-dusted tennis shoes, grasping for something more than a lighted match and a puff of smoke. He interrupts my grasping.

"You have to read up on Frida Kahlo," he says. "She is a lot like you. You should go in that direction." His back leans against the brick wall, and his legs cross, waiting for my reply. I feel stupid for not knowing who Frida Kahlo is, so I nod at the sidewalk and promise I will look her up. He sits down beside me, the first time I have seen him sit since the art history lesson across the hall. I gather my courage and speak.

"Where are you from?" I ask. Stupid question, but I have to know the origin of that slight accent, that skin color that is neither black nor white, the largeness of his nose that is not just big but unfamiliar. After a long pause, he answers.

"Iran."

I hear no embarrassment in the way he says it, but perhaps a little insecurity, as if too many times that one word aroused in other people images of Mid-East terrorists. Is that his shadow? I fumble for something to say, to make up for my asking, but he speaks before I come up with the right words.

"Do you have a family?" he asks. Where did that come from?

"Two boys, eighteen and fourteen, and a husband," I answer softly.

He smiles deep. His eyes shine and no wrinkles appear above his thick eyebrows. "I have a son," he replies. "He's eight and very smart."

For the first time, I see Kaveh inside. I smile back and look at his hand. No ring. He notices where I am looking.

"It didn't work out," he says as he puts out his cigarette. "Time to get back to class." I follow him through the alley, both of us feeling a little uneasy, like we have said too much. Before he opens the door, he stops and turns.

"You are very talented," he says. "You shouldn't always listen to me." I am embarrassed by his praise, so I blurt out the only thing I can think of.

"How do you pronounce your last name?" It is printed on his syllabus. "Is it Sha-ki-khan or Sha-ki-khan?"

"It doesn't matter. Whichever you prefer."

* * *

The rest of the semester goes that way. Kaveh doesn't tell us in words to do whatever we prefer, but his shadow works at staying in the background until we beckon it for advice.

More art history, only this time it is not in the empty room. Slide shows, lectures, waving arms. Expressionism and cubism, distortion and remodeling of torsos and toes, faces and fingers. "Don't just draw what you see," he says. He points to his chest. "Draw what you feel."

I fall in love with Edvard Munch and drain my supply of charcoal and erasers trying to capture his style. Finally I give up, tear the paper off the easel, and sit. Kaveh walks by, glances at the floor, and says, "You have to savor your reality, not rise above it."

"What does that mean--" He has already left. I stare at the paper, take a break, smoke a cigarette, come back, look at the floor, and see a weak imitation of Munch. I hang it back on my easel, borrow eraser and charcoal, and draw my own reality.

The next day, the new model forces me to sit again. Too perfect breasts, too skinny legs, seductive poses geared to make the best of her body for her. I draw Kaveh instead. He walks by and then comes back, glances, and walks on. I continue drawing him from within my head, bury myself so much in charcoal and paper that I don't feel his shadow until it speaks.

"That's me?" he asks. I turn around and nod. He nods back and walks away, but not before I catch the pleased look on his face.

* * *

When the semester ended, I bought a book on Frida Kahlo, read every page, examined every reproduction of her art, read it again. I see nothing in her like me, yet, except for the title of the book: The Brush of Anguish.

I only drew that one rose, but every rose I have received since sits in a vase in my office. I add one of my own from time to time. I always buy them tight. Although I haven't watched every stage of their dying, I still see the shadows of their past lives and what makes each rose unique, just as I now see beyond black and white, breasts and bulges, and find not only what is unique within each human figure but what is within me as an artist--the uniqueness of my own creativity.

Those first marks are always difficult, and the white of the paper continues to challenge me. When it does, I sit back in my chair and wait for Kaveh's shadow.