I have fashion sense, I have a sense of humour, I have sensibilities… but I have no art sense… I suck at creating art… I sometimes watch DR picking up a pen and making great drawings in seconds and feel somewhat jealous that I could never do that… In fact, I almost flunk Art classes through high school because I sucked that bad at it… Every year I’d be in the 50′s or low 60′s in my grades.

The ultimate worse was Grade 12, my last year of high school… I was doing well in all my classes except for Art… in today’ standards, it would be known as an Epic Fail.

Here are some examples:

We were all given clay and asked to create any object. We would then glaze and fire them so we could have our own little pottery souvenir to take home… People were going crazy making ashtrays, flower pots, pencil holders, beer mugs, etc. Me? I decided to make a bear… except it didn’t work out so well, I ended up with a ball of clay to which I sort of put a head on and some tiny little arms… ugly as shit. When we were given instruction on the glazing, we were told we would not see the colours just yet, they would come out after they had been in the oven at the firing stage… Guess what, my bear came out brown with baby blue arms and nose… FAIL!

One time we came in to class and the teacher divided us in teams of 4 students, we were all seated at small tables and were told to draw the other people at the table in any situation we wanted, we could do one only, or two, or all 3 if we wanted… Oh the imagination nightmare… the guy facing me decided to go caricature style, the girl next to me went for realistic portrait… Me? I decided to draw their heads as if they were balloons floating in the sky… you guessed it: FAIL!

One day, our project was to redesign the sleeve cover of our favourite album… it was the end of the70′s and my sister was pretty much the one buying all the music in our house, so it was mighty disco… I didn’t have a favourite album per say… so I looked to my right, one guy decided to redo the Star Wars cover with some X-Wings shooting lasers, next to him some guy was redoing the cover of Close Encounter Of The Third Kind, in fact there was a lot of guys doing both Star Wars and Close Encounters… I thought of Abba, I thought of Donna Summers, I thought of Saturday Night Fever or Grease, I mean, these were the albums we had… but I panicked and took a chance on Star Wars just making a black background with lots of white dots as stars and a long red laser shooting through that… Don’t guess anymore, it was another FAIL! If I was given this project today, I’d simply draw a BEACH CLOSED sign posted by the sea and in the background you could see the Amity Island billboard… simple yet people would know it was for the JAWS soundtrack… I’d probably fail and write Amityville on the billboard.

But the very worst of all my Grade 12 project, the biggest and loudest “F” I ever got, in fact I believe the teacher gave me an F+. See, he gave us all a piece of wood and one of those wood burning pens. The project was fairly simple: using our name or initials, we had to create a logo and then use the wood burning pen to draw in on the wood, somewhat making a sign for our fake business… I thought using Michel would suck, so I went with my initial MP… this is what I came up with:

artfailure1

See the first 2 bubbly-thingies are the M and the last one is the P sort of making a flower out of my initials. I thought it was clever but it certainly wasn’t enough for a “business” sign, so I went crazy and “upped” it with more “graphicness”, like this:

artfailure2

The teacher couldn’t even look me in the eyes when he gave us our projects back. In fact, I think he might have been crying because not only had I failed, but as a teacher, I’m sure he felt he had failed as well…

I went on to College after that, but never took any more art classes

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