return to worldwidereview.com,
the home of critical reviews
From: blp Category: Art Date: 28 May 2007 Time: 08:49 AM Review: On average, drawing skills in contemporary art are pretty low. I had some good drawing teaching at various points and the dumb thing is, it's something almost anyone can improve at if they're shown how. And once you've had that, it's something you can run with in any direction you like. It doesn't limit you, just gives you more to work with and more fluency - like learning a language or an alphabet or a computer programme. Clearly at some point in English art schools people got the idea en mass that they pretty much couldn't teach anything anymore, so there's hardly any drawing teaching except in weirdy outposts like the Prince's Drawing School. I remember reading something a Goldsmith's tutor said about how you could have a life model at Goldsmith's, but only if you could mount a really convincing theoretical justification for it. Incredibly pompous and totally putting the cart before the horse. Whatever happened to the honest notion that people become students because of what they don't know rather than what they already think they know? It's suffocating. I read a systems analysis paper recently and I can't seem to stop applying its thinking to everything, including this. The woman who wrote it had studied under a famous systems expert at MIT who'd said that, in every study he ran, he found that people were incredibly good at finding the leverage points for change in a system, then pushing them in the wrong direction. I think this applies in two ways to the drawing at art school issue. First of all, if I understand it correctly, the idea that you can't teach it is to do with some idea of imparting freedom to students, but, as I've already sort of indicated, it actually limits their freedom because it leaves them stuck in their old patterns of knowledge and behaviour, which may be very limited indeed. Imagine taking the same attitude to reading and writing. Second, students themselves generally push their drawing itself in various wrong directions. Drawing from a photo seems easier (as well as seeming cool thanks to the thirty-year old strategies of Gerhard Richter and Warhol) and somehow more sophisticated and less naive, though it's rarely fully explained how. More fundamentally, most students start off thinking drawing is either a matter of being very careful and meticulous if you want to do it 'well' or kind of tearing into it if you want to do it in a primitivist or cartoony way. It's a totally false dichotomy. A good drawing teacher will get students tearing into it, not to turn them prescriptively into wildheart expressionists, but to quickly develop a fluency in depicting what they see. Yes, of course the drawing will never actually be what they see, yes, there will always be multiple ways of depicting the subject and yes, ultimately, you may well want the art work to have a certain autonomy from the subject or depiction in general, but you'll have a way better understanding of all those issues if you've butted up against them in practice, plus a lot more means at your disposal for deconstructing or transcending the process of depiction.