So You Don't Like Art Classes... part one

 This is part of a series now as I've touched on something people seem to want to hear about so here goes......
Where did you learn to do what you do and where can I take a class  series.
I'm taking you back..... way back.
You see being an Assemblage Artist, as I explained in my previous post, starts with the Assemblage that is YOU. You know that cake decorating course you took once? Oh yeah you CAN use those skills now, not to mention the tools!! Scrapbooking? tick Interior Design? tick Dog Grooming? tick :) Wool Classing? tick ok ok you get the idea.
Question: "Hey you did Art at School, right?"............
I'm 39 and some months... and when I went to school back in the Pre "Everyone's a Winner and Get's a Prize" days I took Art at High School. The teachers back in those days not only failed you in art, they told you straight out that it was 'no good' and 'hey drawing horses is better' and..."check out this idiot Ken Done, he calls that art and thinks people will buy it."
Oh yes my arty friends, I was the weird Gothic chick who lived in the dark room developing macro shots of barbed wire and drawing vampires and wolves (mmmm if only I'd been better at creative writing).

Anyway... in my art class was a blond willowy classic beauty who drew horses. They where MAGNIFICENT. Muscles rippling under glossy coats, cantering through scenes from classical Australian poetry. Her best friends in Art Class all drew horses to different degrees of fantasticness and when they weren't don't that, they would make beautiful clay vases for the teacher and Monet inspired collages out of tissue paper. Meanwhile up the back... I was hand coloring my black and white images of barbed wire with blood on fence posts and drawing vampire cats. 

Unfortunately our art teacher was not the kind of art teacher that appreciated my brand of contemporary art. If I had a time machine (first of all I would of written down all those 'I wish a Vampire would come to school here' fantasies) and then I could of shown her that, in fact, she was wrong about my art and that a vase full of barbed wire with a vampire cat in it would probably sell for millions some day. I'd live in a loft in New York and people would beg me to let them make barbed wire entangled butterfly prints on clocks with my name on them in my amazing studio.

So I left High School (early)... with a nice foundation in "I'm never going to Art College 'cause Art Classes suck" attitude. BUT I had learnt photography including processing and because no one liked photography, including the teacher,  I was left on my own to play Mad Photography Alchemist! Out of that came my ability to  improvise, to research and to experiment in art. I even found supplies to hand tint photographs at a junk shop and a book on the subject.
AND to this day I still love photography and I did work in photography once.. but that's another blog post.

So don't tell me you learnt nothing at school cause your teacher hated you... you can't draw a straight line blah blah blah.... think back... you got SOMETHING right? Yes you did... what was it?
If you loved Art at school, well it goes without saying... you where in an awesome fertile ground and got off to a great start. What did you learn back then that you can bring into your art today?

This is kinda like the Jedi... lol... "The Power is Within You".... Jedi Assemblage Artist Master Class.......oh ok time to go.... :)

Link to more skull type dolls.