So you can’t draw a straight line, redux.

You may remember my friend Amy telling me last summer that she couldn’t draw a straight line, and me challengingher to let me teachher. Her sister Martha was in town this week, and she asked me if she could come to my painting class on Saturday.

Like Amy, Martha has a doctorate from a prestigious American university. She also recently went back and got an MS in landmark preservation from an art school. However, the last time Martha actually took a hands-on art class was when she was a freshman at Brighton High School. (By my calculations, that must have been at least twenty years ago.)

Here is her drawing, and here is her painting—both done in a single three-hour class.

“This is some kind of parlor trick,” my daughter Laura told me afterward. “You take people who ‘can’t do art’ and in three hours prove to them that they can.”

Well, duh, honey. Most people believe the lie that art is magic, rather than craft. And the methodology for teachingdrawing and painting has become impossibly corrupted in modern America (with a few notable exceptions). Yes, I’m repeating myself here, but I’ll continue to do so as long as people believe the lie that they can’t draw.

If you’re interested, there is more information on my fall classes here.