I’m 15 and walking around an art gallery with a sketchbook tucked underneath my arm. I am just so damn cool.

I was doing it. I was an art student. Well, not quite. I was about to start my high school-level art class. While I was going into my exam years at school, my parents were in the middle of a divorce. We had our core subjects we had to take and then got to choose the rest. Picking art felt like a luxury; a tiny semblance of control in an otherwise chaotic life. It was going to be ok – I had my art.

That conviction faltered, however, before I even made it into the first lesson. 

In the gallery, I’m unable to do my assignment. Our summer homework was to critique famous artwork. But as I look at the paintings on the gallery wall, I don’t have the language to explain why they’re making me feel how I’m feeling.

I was supposed to produce a report breaking down the tone, composition and colour of a list of famous paintings. I knew that there was a logical explanation for how paintings were done, but I just couldn’t see it. Or maybe I didn’t want to know. It was like I was trying to figure out a magic trick, I knew the strings were there but finding them would vanish the illusion. 

I still don’t know how to critique art. When I saw the Richard Serra sculptures at Dia Beacon, I couldn’t explain why I was overwhelmed by a sense of doom. Or when I lay under Olafur Eliasson’s synthetic sun at the Tate a physical warmth washed over me. Or when I looked into the eyes of a Frank Auerbach portrait, my chest tightened.

The two years of art class were a slog. The classes were not the solace I’d hoped they’d be, instead, they became my torment. I remember one assignment in particular where we had to sketch a still life. I couldn’t get the fruits and flowers to look realistic. But I was even more frustrated that I didn’t even want to be making them look realistic in the first place. Still life is not my vibe, neither to draw nor to view. Cezanne’s Basket of Apples does nothing for me. Trying to draw fruit that looked like fruit was antithetical to how I felt I needed to express myself. I was interested in more abstract forms of expression. 

I complained to my dad about my frustrations. I felt like my drawings weren’t good enough and even though I kept trying to improve my paintings, I just wasn’t getting it right. He told me that assessing art was an oxymoron. If Van Gogh had done an art course at school, he would’ve flunked it. That kind of helped. It explained why the girl who did screen printing got such good marks. I thought her work was terrible. It had no soul but she was great at marketing it well to the teachers. She got an A*. 

For my final project, I painted an abstract face. I guess it was a self-portrait. I used acrylic paint and remember a lot of red and brown swirls on an A3 canvas. Towards the end of the day, my art teacher came over and looked at the piece. 

“Hmm. Ok,” he said. “We need to do something with this.” 

Then, he picked the canvas up off the easel and told me to follow him downstairs. He laid out it on a cutting board and used an exacto knife to slice it into triangular shapes. He handed me the fragments, a piece of backing board and a can of adhesive spray. 

“You need to make a collage out of this.”

“Why?”

“Because otherwise, you’re going to get a D.”

I had to spray the toxic glue outside, so I was crouched awkwardly around of the back of the art block, trying to put the pieces of myself back together. I don’t think I cried, but I probably did.

Results day was a couple of months later. I stood in the school car park and opened up that stupid envelope, scanned the results and thought, “I cut up my art project and all I got was a lousy B”. 

***

There was a rumour that the art teacher had been in the 1970s rock band, Adam and the Ants, but left before they got famous. I went on their Wikipedia page and either the rumour wasn’t true or he was only in that band for five minutes because there are about a dozen former members and he’s not listed as one of them. 

I prefer the latter explanation because it fuels my narrative that he was bitter about his own failed artistic career and was taking it out on his students. It’s crass but I guess I like to think that he got his kicks from cutting up teenage girls’ art projects. In reality, I'm sure he'd say that he did it because he was trying to help me get the grade. And I do know that to be true. 

I recently learned the term “overfitting”. It’s a phenomenon that happens in machine learning when a  model learns the training data too well and can't generalise to new data. A good example of this is spam filters. So if a spam filter was trained on specific words like “viagra”, it can inadvertently filter out legitimate emails. EG if you have a legit email from your doctor about your Viagra prescription, it’s likely going to end up in your junk.  

As Dan Shipper wrote in his essay about optimal optimisation, “When we overly focus on perfecting a certain process or task, we become excessively tailored to the task at hand, and unable to handle variations or new challenges effectively.” 

My art teacher's decision to cut up my project is a dramatic example of overfitting. He was so focused on the specific criteria of the assessment that he was unable to see the value of my work on its own terms. 

There’s perhaps no greater example of the negative consequences of overfitting than in education. Kids aren’t taught to learn, but how to take tests. In the highly competitive environment of my all-girls school, grades were everything. The fact that I thought a B was a bad grade tells you everything you need to know. I wasn’t learning for the sake of learning, but to pass an exam. (If you’ve ever wondered why as adults we’re so obsessed with productivity – looking at how we teach kids to optimise for test scores gives you a massive clue).  

So as tempting as it is for me to dismiss him as merely a bad teacher, the ex-rocker was just doing exactly what he was supposed to. He was teaching me how to tick a box, not how to develop my talent as an artist. He was doing his job. 

So the real question becomes: why do I still care about this? 

I said I chose art, but it wasn’t really a choice. As far as I was concerned, it was a given that I would do it. I thought that I was good at drawing so why wouldn’t pursue that skill? Looking back now, I wonder why I thought that – was it because people kept telling me I was good or because I actually enjoyed drawing? I’m not sure.

The relationship between intrinsic and external motivation is deeply complex. Truthfully, while I want to say that all I care about is the creative process and that external validation doesn’t matter to me, of course it does. I wanted the grade AND to feel like I’d expressed true myself in my art. I still do.

Cutting up my work was violent! It was a brutally poetic end to the art class. The knife butchered my work, a physical manifestation of all the pain and anger I was feeling – not just about my grades but my whole 16-year-old world. I was sad and confused about my parents divorcing, felt out of place in my competitive school, devastated by my first heartbreak. Looking back now, any self-help amateur could’ve figured out the connection between the type of art I was drawn to and what was happening in my life then. I couldn’t grasp the slippery edges of my emotions, so I swirled them around on a canvas instead. 

What I’m actually mad about isn’t the fact that my teacher cut up my work, but that he didn’t engage with it. He wasn’t looking at it, not really, he was just trying to slot it into the boxes on his marking sheet. 

I’ve played the tape in my mind of what would happen if I tracked down my art teacher now and asked him why he cut up my painting. It wouldn’t even be that hard to get hold of him. But when I get to the part where I ask why he did it, I don’t want to.

Not because I think he’ll tell me that my project was shit and that I was a bad student but because I don’t think he’ll remember me – or my art – at all. Because in the question of “Why did you do it?” is another, much more vulnerable one: “Did I matter?” 

And that’s a question that I’m desperate to know the answer to but also too afraid to ask.

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