Every Thursday for the past eight months or so I’ve been going to a local art center for drawing lessons. The center is in a California-style cedar house that could only be more bohemian had it a hot tub. The two rooms inside would remind most people born before 1985 of their elementary school art classes. The walls are paneled in wood and hung with pop-surrealist prints and old awareness-campaign posters warning of the dangers of everything from tobacco to abandoned fridges. Philodendra and spider plants hang from wooden beams that span the ceiling, and there are mugs filled with pencils and paintbrushes and boxes labelled “Slides” and “Carbon Copies” and old photographs stacked on shelves along the walls. The whole place smells like chalk and oil paint and the Maxwell House instant coffee our instructor sips throughout the evening sessions.