return to worldwidereview.com,
the home of critical reviews
From: J Category: Art Date: 30 May 2007 Time: 05:07 PM Review: As a graduate of the ruskin school of drawing I feel I have to put my tuppence in. The place that most put me off drawing ( I mean formal classes in the subject) was the Ruskin, we had to do, as a remnant of oxford stuffiness, anatomy and life drawing. I found it stultifying, I don't like being told what to do, the teacher was tedious, and I couldn't see the point of studying muscles and doing exercises in drawing the figure. Wrong time for me, bad tutor, you might argue. Proves nothing. Still I feel the ideas you put forward tie into my experiences, the idea that drawing is a language that we can learn, and that it will be the building block or framework we will keep using. This is often a disguised conservatism, a mask concealing a distaste for less verifiable visual art, another way of saying we must all learn skills or otherwise it is all just a sham. Close to the art is bollocks brigade Why the hierarchy? Copying a photo is inferior to drawing a figure? Well the old masters, when they were young novices used to just copy etchings and drawings, they weren't less loose on reality. Did it undermine their later efforts? Why life drawing and not still life, or drawing from casts (the primary 3D source for most 19th century students) or hours of training in cross hatching or serious anatomy, or Bauhaus drawing, or drawing squares and circles, or any other system or rubbing a mark-making material on some kind of surface. Why not just train to draw only from memory (for it's all in the head anyway). ?? How have you decided that drawing, especially life drawing, is at the core of it all. Maybe if you skip it you might get something new happening. Maybe we should all start with oil or watercolour so that we never learn to reduce things to line, such an abstract idea anyway. Art is a way of thinking where there is no language to guide us, where we should make it all up as we go along, where we have such a rich history, and the freedom and urgency to destroy it all. No, life drawing (or even drawing itself) isn't the way we need to start, it could be anything from photography to cartooning to gardening that will give us a visual way of thinking. You are right about having a good teacher, but that teacher, whatever they teach, will give you the thirst for more, and it doesn't matter what you start with.