of Drawing 1 at RCTC. 26 students. New easels, tables and supplies. We spent the morning reading the syllabus.... hopefully the big art words didn't scare them off. I have spent many years as the teacher, but I still remember my first drawing class at RISD with Michael Yefko. He smelled like coffee and cigarettes and wore his hair in a ponytail. It was a seven hour studio once a week. It was heaven. He gave us our supply list at the beginning of class, and sent us to the RISD Store to purchase everything. We had an hour, and the bookstore was the world's best playground. I bought tools I knew nothing about and had never used. We came back up to class, and Michael had set up a still life of pots and bones. We had a 24x36 inch pad of newsprint, and we started drawing. I had never drawn that big, and it was the smallest size I drew on all year. We came back the next week to draw the model....another first for me. I don't remember much about the model, but I remember making a gesture drawing of the model with compressed charcoal and it was a revelation. I loved gesture drawings. Longer drawings found me getting fussy and caught up in particulars while I lost sight of the whole. Gesture drawings were this wonderful process of discovery every single time. I still think there is nothing more beautiful than that feather-like mark of compressed charcoal swooping across the page. I hope I can help my students find what excites them about their own drawing. Discovering my drawing during that freshman year was one of the best moments of my artistic life.