I’m taking a senior citizen art class. During the first class, the teacher suggested we use pencil to sketch a grayscale still life she had set up. Everyone else used pencil or charcoal.

I used a dip pen and India ink instead, because I like black ink. My picture was atrocious, because I was working quickly and didn’t care how good it was.

Our second class, she set up a vivid and colorful still life with lots of intense colors, and told us to use pastels.

I used water colors, because pastels and I do not get along; they tend to get all over me, and I smudge them too much and get an undifferentiated brownish mess. I’m bad at watercolor, too, but it doesn’t matter. My resulting picture was lurid in the extreme. 

The third class, the teacher instructed the students in one-point perspective.

I studied perspective in the 1970s in college, and again in a drawing class I took a couple of years ago. I’m not doing perspective again. I drew with a brush pen instead, off to one side, along with another student who had taken perspective several times.

The fourth class was yesterday, and we met at the Apple Store for instruction in the Procreate app.

Procreate an art program I’ve been using off and on for several years now. I took a class in it last year.

I made a picture of my cat in Procreate, using about eleven different layers and playing around with all kinds of tools. It was a hideous picture. I say that with great pride. The cat looks as if it died of a terrible old age behind a wall, wasn’t discovered for a long time, and then someone stuffed it was dried beans and mounted it.

One of the other students is an interior designer, but she’s not confident doing art, and she said she envied my confidence. I confessed that I went to art school a long time ago.

“So it’s your passion,” she said. 

“No, it’s not. I’m not particularly passionate about it,” I said, which upon reflection is something I have known for a long time. Once I thought I was passionate about art, but now I don’t even know what that’s supposed to mean.

I’m not in that class to be good, or even to be passionate. I’m there to mess around, to be myself, and to do it in the company of others. Yes, I’m confident, but confidence means the freedom to be bad at what I’m doing, not just being good at it.

Next week we are meeting outside in a little park I’ve been to before. I will doubtless do something other than what the instructor tells us to do. She’s a very good teacher, so she probably won’t get upset with me.

This is the most fun I have had in art class for a long time.