Drawn to Art

Maybe everyone is an artist, as Joseph Beuys said, but art school might not be for everyone.

Fortunately, there are alternatives to the traditional classroom, without the upfront expense and commitment of school. They go by different names: drop-in classes, open drawing sessions, walk-in ateliers. (Minnesotans, I'm told, call them co-ops.) But the idea behind them is pretty much the same -- a laid-back, flexible, pay-as-you-go setting in which to draw or paint with other like-minded individuals. Because they're often self-guided, or with instruction tailored to different levels of ability, they can be perfect for those who want to acquire the basics and for those looking to sharpen their skills -- skills that may or may not have lain dormant since college, high school or beyond.

In the past several weeks, I stopped by a few of them.

Art League School

On a chilly Friday evening in early February, I begin my rounds with a visit to a somewhat spartan studio in the low, converted warehouse building that constitutes the annex to Alexandria's Art League School. The school's offerings include formal classes and an array of proctored, but not instructed, life-drawing sessions like the one I'm sitting in on.

Joining a rough circle of seven other people (two more will eventually show up), I pull out my sketch pad and begin drawing the powerfully built naked model raising what looks like a broom handle above his head in the center of the room. After a few minutes, his timer beeps, and he changes position, accompanied by the sound of a flurry of turning pages. Tonight, in accordance with the wishes of the group, the first half-hour will be devoted to quick warm-up sketches of five minutes' duration, followed by two hour-long poses, although the sequence and duration of poses changes week to week. "Did you notice how our model didn't flinch for over an hour?" jokes monitor Joe Spollen, who runs the session, after the first 60-minute pose ends. "They've all been screened through the astronaut program."

Other than during breaks, when the model steps down to stretch his limbs and students move about the room, chatting and checking out one another's work, there is no sound but the tick-tick-tick of the wall clock and the scratching of brush, pencil, pastel, charcoal and eraser. It may be a Friday, party-hearty night in nearby Old Town, but this group is here to work, says Spollen, who has been monitoring drawing sessions at the school for eight years.

"Sometimes a social event will break out afterwards," he says, but while the model is there, it's all business. Only a few times has Spollen had to throw anybody out, when it became clear that a couple of visitors had dropped in to ogle the model, not to make art. It's easy to spot gawkers, he says, even if they come armed with pencil and paper as a prop. "You can just tell," he says. "It's like suddenly you're in a Budweiser commercial."

As I look around the room during a break, it's refreshingly clear to me that everyone has his or her own definition of "figurative" art. Though everyone else has rendered the model with more or less strict representation, Elizabeth Frownfelter, a youth instructor and registrar at the Art League, has created a composition of abstract-looking blobs in charcoal. "See this form here," she says, pointing to one shape whose rounded contours more closely resemble the innards of a lava lamp than a human figure. "This is based on his shoulder."

Dana Ellyn Studio

Dana Ellyn wants to teach the world to paint. In fact, after a mere half-hour of watching me take notes over her students' shoulders, three of whom have gathered in the D.C. painter's 860-square-foot studio/living space on this Tuesday evening, she has cajoled me into putting down my reporter's notebook and picking up a brush. Before long, I'm comfortable enough to ignore several of the painting tips she typically doles out to first-time students -- such as how it's better to paint the background first and the foreground last -- much to the detriment of the imaginary portrait before me (which is starting to look remarkably like "The Addams Family's" Uncle Fester).

"You're about to find out why I said that," says Ellyn, a George Washington University grad in fine arts and art history who quit her law-firm job five years ago to become a full-time artist. Too late. I've already realized my mistake, as the once-crisp outlines of Fester's bald head have become obscured by globs of encroaching acrylic sky.

The artist offers several painting classes a week at her live-work condo, where the walls are decorated floor to ceiling with her boldly graphic paintings. Although she prefers a six-session commitment, attendance is flexible. One student, who tonight is working on a design of his own creation that I'll call "Turkey in a Landscape," says he skipped the last couple of sessions due, in one instance, to illness and, in the other, to "ennui." Ellyn also runs a program called Art at Work, in which she takes her classes on the road to companies and their employees.

Tonight, in addition to the budding Audubon, two young women are copying art-book reproductions: a Gustav Klimt nude and Claude Monet's "Woman With a Parasol -- Madame Monet and Her Son." (Ellyn doesn't use models. Students can choose to work from photos, reproductions, still lifes or their own imaginations.) This being the night before Valentine's Day, a nearby table holds a basket of crusty bread, homemade hummus and a bowl of red, heart-shaped gumdrops. There's also a bottle of red wine -- only for students who are of age, of course, Ellyn laughs with a glance at the American University freshman at work on the Monet, which is now upside down to facilitate painting the blades of grass.