Drawn From Life

A true story by Erick Sahler

Harvey Ball was one bad mutha. He dressed like a greaser — blue dungarees, white T-shirt, black leather jacket — and wore thick-framed Buddy Holly eyeglasses. He drove a 1970 El Camino with Cragar wheels and fatties on the rear. His tongue was sharp and he didn’t take crap from anybody.

He was an art punk who had the same name with the man who created the iconic Smiley Face graphic in 1963. You can look it up. If there was a connection, he never mentioned it. That wasn’t his style.

Harvey Ball taught Life Drawing at UMBC in the fall of 1986. Whenever he entered the classroom I heard that whistling cowboy theme from “The Good, The Bad and The Ugly”

Life Drawing is a weed-out class, a hurdle designed to thin the herd of aspiring art majors. Students were required to draw what was in front of them — still-life pottery and plants at first, then flowing patterned drapes and crumpled paper bags, and eventually live nude models. After each session, we’d pin our work to the wall for critique. Harvey Ball was merciless. The students followed his lead. There were no survivors.

Some people say baseball is a metaphor for life, that it teaches adversity and overcoming failure because even great hitters only reach base three in 10 times. The people who say that never took Harvey Ball’s drawing class, where the success rate was much lower.

I anticipated a cake walk. I trained with the artist Keith Whitelock for six years. I had three years of experience creating commercial illustrations in the screen printing business. I was confident I could handle anything Harvey Ball tossed my way.

I was wrong.

By mid-semester, Harvey Ball had correctly deduced that I had been drawing my homework assignments from photographs — my own photographs — but still a big no-no in a life drawing class.

He outed me on a landscape project, in which I shot images of an old store on Wilkens Avenue and meticulously reproduced every detail in a pencil drawing, including all the advertising signage and even the individual bricks of the facade. I received an F, but even worse, Harvey Ball announced to the class I had been using photographs to draw all my homework assignments. It was true. All I could do was smile and shrug.

For our final project, we were assigned to make a life drawing of a subject of our choosing at Baltimore’s Cross Street Market, a bustling neighborhood grocery just south of Inner Harbor. It was mid-December, the end of the semester, finals week with multiple projects due. In addition to school, I had taken a holiday job at a Sam Goody record store where I worked nights and weekends. Physically and mentally exhausted, I got the flu. Stumbling around Cross Street Market making sketches I hit rock bottom. I wanted to give up and come home.

On my way out, I visited a butcher’s stall and for a few dollars purchased a giant bone taken from a cow’s leg. Alone in my apartment — all three roommates had already moved out for the semester — I unwrapped the bone from its newspaper packaging and started sketching it in charcoal. It stunk like death. I kept the trash can nearby, alternately vomiting and weeping as I drew.

The finished piece was more ominous than anything I ever created. I captured the bone in two different angles and scales so it was unrecognizable — organic shapes floating in darkness — but it was real. And, in hindsight, it was as close as I ever got to a self-portrait — a symbolic snapshot of the tired, sick, lonely kid I was in December 1986.

I turned in the assignment and drove back to the Eastern Shore on Christmas Eve. As my family gathered to exchange gifts — a cherished event I looked forward to each year — I went into my grandmother’s room and fell asleep on her bed.

I completely missed Christmas that year.

But Harvey Ball gave me an A on my final project in Life Drawing, and that makes me Smiley, even today.

By mid-semester, Harvey Ball had correctly deduced that I had been drawing my homework assignments from photographs — my own photographs — but still a big no-no in a life drawing class.

Life Drawing students were required to draw what was in front of them — from still lifes to live nude models.