“Your eye looks like a leaf,” the drawing teacher said calmly to Diana probably for the 4562th time in his sixty-year career of seeing different novice students making the same mistakes over and over again,” your shading needs more work and your page setup was wrong to begin with because your subject is too small. Watch this object, watch it for a very long time and you will eventually see it right. And for God’s sake, get a pencil that actually has a sharp tip, otherwise your drawings might end up looking like the doodles of a toddler!”
It’s not that the drawing teacher from a graphics club in her home city in Romania was absurd, ill-natured or bored. Not at all, he was just a perfectionist, and Diana ended up appreciating his criticism more than his scanty praises, because it was from that criticism that she could actually learn anything if she were to hang in there and swallow everything up. So after the leafy eye came a flattened mouth and a sharp-edged portrait of a statue with a really long neck and other similarly flawed works which stirred a similar critical reaction. But with each, Diana realized that it didn’t really matter how badly or well each drawing turned out. Well, all right, maybe she liked bloating in her feathers a little whenever other students would ask her if she studied at the local art high school, when in fact in everyday life she was struggling with getting as much of her 100-problem math and physics weekly assignments done, since her high school curriculum focused on these scary-looking subjects more than on anything else. But what she eventually came to understand was that it was what she learned from each attempt that mattered, that maybe the motive behind the teacher’s pickiness was not perfection in itself, but progress.
Leaving behind her much beloved home in Romania, Diana came to Princeton to study engineering and feeling the need to somehow continue art under one form or another and expand her horizon by turning from critiqued to critic, she enrolled in Professor Chubbuck’s seminar in Impressionism and Modern Art where she discovered the intriguing stories lying underneath the blurry, palette-knife- marks-bearing canvasses of the paintings she had heard of but never gave much thought to. It is true that the seminar ended up resembling her drawing course quite a lot in that she was perhaps more criticized for her illogical sentences and structure and awkward phrasing than criticizing the works of art herself, but as she looks back on it, she realizes that the benefits of the criticisms are yet to be reaped in her future courses’ writing assignments. She is therefore extremely grateful to everyone who expressed any form of constructive criticism during this semester and she is impatiently hanging in there, clung onto the edge of her seat, waiting for any form of criticism on these pages on Toulouse-Lautrec that you, Dear Reader of these lines, can now browse!