Painterly Perspective by Chloe

Painterly Perspective by Chloe - January 2026 Scholarship Essay

“The only way to get better is to draw every day. Even if it’s just for 30 min…” My art teacher, Mr. Harrington, repeats these words weekly, daily even. They have become white noise. Whether it’s help to make the perspective look just right or an explanation of shading, his words get shoved in the back of my mind. I stare down at my blank paper. Our latest chore was creating a still life of a skeleton. With each stroke my frustration increases, the pen lines refusing to cooperate. My eyes wander to my classmates' drawings, to see how perfect and precise they all look. Then Mr. Harrington looms behind me. He stares at my sketch before saying, “I think the head is too small.”
Who cares?
“You need to fix the proportions.”
Ugh. That’s going to take so much time.
I just nod in fake agreement until he walks away.

Ever since the isolation of Covid in middle school, art has consumed my life. I had convinced myself I was going to become the next Van Gogh, watching how-to videos, drawing on the side of worksheets, anywhere I could. I worked hard to get into a specialized art high school. But only months in, the spark died. Every glance at my classmates’ work crystallized the notion that I couldn’t compete. Instead of a boost of adrenaline with starting a new piece, I dreaded it. My mind went to all the ways I could mess up.

“Today we’ll be starting oil painting. You have 30 minutes.”
Panic floods my body. Oil painting? I’ve never done that before. Does everyone else know what to do? The model sat in front of the classroom. 30 minutes was nowhere near enough time to paint something. How could I create something perfect in such little time?
“Don’t get too caught up on the details, try to get the painting complete,” my teacher repeats again and again.
I balance my canvas unsure of where to start. I can’t even sketch it out in pencil first.
“25 minutes left.”
My worries stop. There’s no time to obsess over each stroke of paint. I take a deep breath and dip my paintbrush into the burnt sienna dollop. My first mark on the canvas is thick and uneven, but instead of crumpling the paper up I simply go back to the palette to grab more paint. I get into a rhythm, letting my paintbrush travel back and forth. Before I knew it, time was up. I hadn’t created a hyper realistic piece but instead something painterly. It had harsh transitions of color and paint so thick in some places you could see the individual brushstrokes. It felt more human, imperfect but rich, emotions jumping off the page like I had never seen in my art before.

“Fix the nose! It looks too big,” my teacher says.
It had been weeks since we started using oil paint and my teacher’s routine critiques were back. I compared the model and my painting. He was right. It looked unproportional. I painted over it, trying to get the correct size. Months before I would have ignored that advice, dismissing it as too much work. Now each critique made sense. Although it made the process longer, the coaching helped me create pieces I was proud of and stopped the itch to look at my peers' paintings.
~
Soon after, my hands dug out a pair of jeans from the back of my closet that I had thrifted almost a year ago. I’d wedged them back there in fear that if I wore them people would laugh. The embroidered jeans become my staple, the bottoms fraying and nicks of oil paint from when I bumped my canvas. The new painterly perspective I’d adopted seeps into other aspects of my life, allowing me to form my own opinions and be comfortable in my own tastes.