The Day I Stopped Measuring

It was a sweltering summer in 1990 when I arrived in Providence for the transfer intensive at Rhode Island School of Design. I had landed in the United States only two days earlier. My English was fragile; my nerves were not.

The Waterman Building sat on a steep slope, its late-19th-century bones wrapped in ornamental ironwork and flooded with light from high skylights. The interior felt almost steampunk — an industrial cathedral to drawing. The studio reminded me of photographs of Auguste Rodin’s atelier: tall, luminous, serious.

I kept repeating to myself: I am here to draw. I am not here to speak.

Victor Lara entered with unmistakable swagger and a beard dramatic enough to belong in a period film. He commanded the room before he said a word.

The model stepped into the center.

As I had done for ten years of academic training in Seoul, I picked up my charcoal, extended my arm, and began measuring proportions. My body knew the ritual: arm locked, eye squinting, charcoal aligned with the figure.

But something shifted in the air.

I could feel puzzled glances. Victor circled the room, commenting in English I could not yet catch. My hypervigilance intensified. I continued measuring, clinging to technique as a life raft.

Days passed. Classes ran from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. In a building with no air conditioning, we were soaked through by midafternoon — sweat, charcoal dust, and exhaustion embedded into our skin. Slowly, Victor began praising my homework. Classmates approached me. I was beginning to breathe.

Then one afternoon, I felt a tap on my shoulder.

Victor mimicked my extended arm with his own charcoal.

“What the hell are you doing?”

The room froze.

My mind would not assemble a sentence. Finally, I managed: “Proportions… measure?”

He paused. Then gestured for me to continue. After a few moments, he stopped the entire class.

He ordered us to the school store to buy two 30-by-48-inch drawing pads.

When we returned, he held a stopwatch.

Every fifteen seconds, he said, we would flip to a new page. Draw instinctively. Right eye to right hand. Le

ft eye to left hand. No measuring. No calculation. Just immediate response.

The model smiled mischievously, sensing revenge.

The first session felt like athletic training. We tore through two pads in one afternoon. Many pages held only scratches — fragments of lines, aborted gestures. We were panting.

But after days of this visual gymnastics, something miraculous happened. Our pads began to hold recognizable bodies. Not measured bodies — felt bodies.

And then it clicked.

He was dismantling the barrier between observation and translation. He was teaching direct transference — the undiluted reaction of the artist to what stands before her. Not proportion as control, but perception as energy.

It felt like a trance.

Light, shadow, contour — captured in fifteen seconds. No interference from fear, language, or correctness.

I began to let go.

On the final day, I completed a drawing that felt different — alive.

Victor grabbed my shoulder and shouted, “Now THAT is a poem!”

Then he asked, “What major are you going into? Architecture? Interior design?”

“Architecture,” I replied.

He stomped his foot.

“Fxxx! They are going to ruin her!”

I have thought about that moment many times.

Architecture did not ruin me. But that summer taught me something I have carried into every discipline since: drawing — and perhaps design itself — is not about measuring the world.

It is about surrendering to it.