The Case for Anger Management
It happened as it happens, surely, to everyone. You’re born, you learn exciting new skills like eating and putting cutlery down the loo and then …someone puts a crayon into your tiny, plump hand.
So you put it in your mouth, obviously.
After a few more lessons you move on to crayon on paper/walls/Faberge eggs and so on and so forth.
My first recollection of a drawing copyright me is of my sister: tiny eyes, pink cheeks, masses of curly brown hair. She has continued to be an inspiration, as you shall see, but the curls are long gone.
For years I would copy Disney and Warner Bros. characters, usually for my sister and brothers to colour in, branching out later to my own creations particularly at Christmas. My Mum was very supportive of creative spirit in her children. Anyone else’s scribblings though were as good as kindling. She and Dad now have what was my room and the sentimental twerps haven't ever changed the cartoon-adorned door.
It was Mum’s nurturing of questionable family talents that saw my sister and me join Beauchamp Music Group in fair Gloucestershire and turn up every Saturday morning, me to sing and murder the recorder, Wee Sis to do…no, can’t remember. I also had a habit of sneezing in rests.
One Christmas there was a Christmas card competition (a happy coincidence?). I was ten. My submission was scribbled on scrap paper in the freezing kitchen where my mum was making teas and coffees for the music staff for their upcoming breaks.
Well, blow me down if it didn’t win first prize. I believe I won a ten pound gift voucher (value not weight). This sketch was printed on cards and sold at Beauchamp House.
So, my head swollen, I swanned off to my Gran’s in Bristol for a week to do oil painting. Gran had taught art to special needs children. I was small beer. I’ll spare you the still life.
But it was not to last.
To the Anger Management debacle.
As detailed above (if you missed it, go back and clean your glasses first), I had a foot in both the music and the art camps. It was GCSE option time and I needed to choose between the two subjects. I was in so many bands at the time (trombone, think ‘Variation on a Theme of Slowly Expiring Bovine’) that I felt I had music covered. So I opted for Art.
Day One, GCSE Art. In I traipsed, happy as a lark in the knowledge that I would spend four hours a week cartooning and honing how to be witty. Unforeseen Teacher Newsflash: You cannot do just cartoons. You have to expand your repertoire. Now, at fourteen I did think, hang on, haven’t I been doing that for fourteen years already? I distinctly recall batik and crepe paper and plaster of Paris and stuff. Yet, my humility made me stop and consider that these art teachers must know a thing or two, being as they were teaching art. So, we went with their plan.
Thus followed two years of utter despondency and what must have been the equivalent of writers’ block. My one concessional cartoon piece I eked out as long as I could. The rest of the shambolic, shameful and utterly awful ‘portfolio’ consisted of: a bottle with a rolled up piece of paper inside surrounded by sand from Dawlish beach including rubbish entitled, condescendingly, ‘Message in a Bottle’; a perspective study of Tudor architecture (eh?); a skewed mirror image of some posh wifey in a portrait style; a picture of the world strapped to a toilet-roll dynamite surrounded by animal eyes; and a Matisse-meets-Hoffnung psychedelic collage of an orchestra finished the night before submission in felt-tip pen.
Sixteen, examination marks in. I achieved a 'C'. Not the end of the world at all. In fact, something of a miracle as far as I was concerned. I was staring limply at the ghastly testimony of the last two years angst when the pottery teacher saw me and joined me. The pottery teacher was a lovely, lovely lady. She really liked my cartoon pig. She even had my clay shoe featuring said pig hanging up on the pottery room wall.
What she said then, in pure innocence, has stayed with me since:
“The examiner said was really impressed with your cartoon. He said that if you’d only done cartoons you would have got an ‘A’.”
Although I don’t recommend internalising seething resentment and anger I’m not going to get all preachy – go your own way. I’m still learning my lesson. I will say it’s not been at all healthy, constructive or easy. I didn’t draw cartoons for ages. Not family birthday cards, not doodles, nothing, nada. It was too painful and something I had loved to do now just resurrected memories and feelings of rage. I have wasted stupid amounts of time and emotional humpfiness over the episode. The art teachers didn’t advise me out of anything other than evidence stacked in their favour. I just shouldn’t have listened to it. It’s not like I can go back and change it. That is what the present and future are for. Or so much I’ve decided. Or decided to decide.
The next time I picked up a pen and drew it was at university. Rachel, poor deluded chump, still has this laminated representation of herself in chemistry post-explosion that she used as a doorsign. (I should elaborate that Rachel does not explode things as a biothingychemist. She cuddles parasites. Her only failing is that she remains unsuccessful in producing a well-known Irish liqueur from sand, despite encouragement.)
The cartoons did not continue to flow, though and when they did they were always accompanied by a sadness. As that episode fades further into the past the feeling grows smaller.
I think the reason there has been greater output over the last three years is attributable to my niece, Amber. Too cute not to draw. Well done, Amber. Try to look less like your dad or the pen’s going in the drawer again.
