Drawing tutors needed

How often do we see this sign up in schools? We assume that despite all the years of being taught, the mathematical language and the English language are important enough that we have to keep at it until everyone gets it.

But drawing? Neglected, left to wither in the early primary grades, not important. As a practitioner of drawing, I'm discouraged. I know how many students need to draw and would come to wanting to draw. And it's not just a matter of fun or pleasure. It's a matter of personal, emotional and intellectual growth.

So find someone to tutor in drawing for all the right reasons.

Do it

You were taught to write and to do mathematics, two important languages. But likely no one taught you to draw even thought this was your first real language. So be fearless. Do it. Dot it for pleasure. Do it to see and understand. Do it to express yourself. Do it to release your imagination. Do it.

Looking

A critical eye is an informed and open eye, saturated by having seen many drawings, in the flesh. For unlike many works of art, drawings stand as valid at any stage of the creative process. A drawing can be many things; and, in some ways, it’s not unfair to expect all things from a good drawing: craft, substance, character, integrity, evidence of a smart and sensitive hand. But each drawing has its own purpose; and while it will always reveal something about its maker and act as a mirror to the artist’s self, it can be measured honestly in relation to its own intent.

Contemporary drawing practice

In contemporary visual art practice, drawing, besides all else, is an end in itself. When drawing is seen as a preparatory act alone, drawings are rarely exhibited in a museum setting and give way to those media that have a cultural history as important. Still, this preparatory aspect of drawing has allowed it to become a widely varying visual activity: skill, medium, tool for exploration, generator of possibilities, problem-solver, research activity. The casualness, intimacy, directness, and unencumberedness of drawing have made it transient and permanent, informal and disciplined, a sketch and a masterwork, on a page and on a wall, in higher dimensional forms, generated by pencil or mouse, the beginning and the end, the most naked expression of the artist. 

Of all contemporary visual practice, drawing is the most basic, the most embracing, the most permissive of play, the most flexible and open to exploration of process and the least weighed down by its own history and expectations.

Autobodiography

Emotional and psychological elements can be expressed in the physical act of drawing since they are part of each artist’s own history and are often suffused into an artist’s style. The pace, character, and sensibility of the mark express those aspects of drawings, sometimes even before the artist recognizes it. But these elements of drawing can be elicited by exercises that contain elements (singly or in combination) of narrative, light, space, time, personal history.

           

I’ve had success in expanding student awareness of this issue with an exercise I call “Autobodiography.” Students are asked to make a life-sized figure drawing which is based on the history of their own bodies. The final drawing then gets built on elements like stages of growth and development; physical activities; physical and mental health history; bodily markers like tattoos and scars; fashion; photo and video documentation of their lives; fantasies; and narratives.

The physical act

Stripped of all else, drawing is a physical act. As such, it should carry the potential of the entire body, its history and experience. Drawing activated at the wrist alone is limited, often poorly informed and narrow in its possibilities. The mark should be informed by the capacity of the entire body in its pace, rhythm, extension, touch and character. It should create space from the physical experience of moving in space. It should respond to the figure from its own history of being alive. When necessary, the mark should be able to dance, to scream, to caress, to dream.

As the language of drawing develops

A mark and a scribble become shapes expanding, bumping and layering. These struggle to mean a little something as they become simple shapes and stick figures. With effort these gain character and dimensionality, which feed fantasy, imagination and personal engagement. Like athletic skill, drawing skill becomes a sign of “prowess.” What has happened, step-by-step, is drawing opening eyes to the complicated and complex, both without and within.

Then formal education intrudes. The energy of youth is bound up and applied to bowls of fruit, shoes and “the portrait.” After years of neglect, the young artist, left to plug away hit or miss, struggles to attain a higher level of “coloring inside the lines.” Uber-muscled men, buxom, attenuated women, robots and imaginary beasts live side-by-side with apples, pears, teapots and mugs. Drawing is representational drawing, making a convincing graphical representation of a thing to gain control of the thing—becomes an important task in adolescence.

The ability to make an accurately observed, convincing representation of a chunk of the real world is a traditional and established aim of the drawing process. Approached correctly, this is a challenge to look carefully, to understand the correct relationship between surface and underlying structure, to draw in a methodical and disciplined way and to exercise patience and persistence. Many who draw build a career on this approach using a range of techniques and decisions to maintain the integrity and life of their images: manipulation of light and shadow, composition, viewpoint, selection of subject matter.

As with any approach, a disciplined, representational one can sabotage itself if it hides behind the seduction of pure technique. When skilled practitioners of this approach “let go,” the discipline and control are in harmonious balance with marks that are alive and vital. This can be seen in the drawing of the French artist Ingres, for example.

Some mastery of this more “academic” approach to drawing is essential for any serious practitioner. It builds confidence, brings the real world under control, disciplines seeing and clarifies the intent and value of self-imposed limitations.

Moving beyond any comfortable limitations of this approach requires faith, trust, inner demands of expression or conception, permission to risk and even the ability to trick oneself. But the advantages are rewarding, even if confusion and disappointment are part of the process. The object is unburdened from its “thingness” and becomes trigger, metaphor, place-holder for emotion, narrative or memory; motive for abstraction; or pure aesthetic pleasure. Reality acts as the armature for sustained investigation in any of these modes.

Of course, drawing is not so rigid a discipline that in practice it must be defined through any single approach. The academic and the experimental, the representational and the abstract, the figurative and the non-objective, the densely layered and the sparsely minimal, any combination of modes, even contradictory ones, is possible.

What results if we think of drawing as a tool for research? We expect to get at something, open it up, fine tune it, probe it in a way we could never do without drawing. We expect we can solve problems we couldn’t as easily without it. We anticipate problems posed and solved to generate new problems. We discover that the problems solved give us new facility with the tool and new possibilities for its use.

And this is, in fact, what happens. In a mind, an imagination, a head packed and struggling with ideas, the marks that accumulate into a sketch or study crystallize images, make them tangible, identify limitations, generate new possibilities. In this dialogue between potentiality and actuality, drawing is a powerful tool.

Drawing, which begins for everyone as raw, naked and instinctive, ends for those who conscientiously pursue it as pervading the body, a part of the self, driving curiosity and problem solving. What happens along the way is a consequence of how talent, education, predilection, persistence and obsession catalyze each other as each individual “collides” with the world.

Collision

“Art is the collision of a man with the universe.” Eugene Ionesco

I’m fond of this definition of art, and it adapts easily to drawing. A doodle. A map. The Klein bottle. Vesalius on anatomy. A lesson in perspective. One of de Kooning’s women. A Degas pencil portrait. A botanical chart. The riches of the universe—both inner and outer—are always within the reach of drawing, and the universe itself is expanded by the drawings that spark from this collision. For me, Ionesco’s “collision” is one of will and courage, expecting that great energy is expended and that notable transformation happens. The whole self armed perhaps with only a pencil thrown at the whole of things.

Drawing as a disciplined skill begins the educational partnership of hand, eye and mind. The hand acts as a tool also of the mind, acknowledging objects, spaces, ideas and concepts. The hand speaks from and of the body and from the mind’s imagination. This synergy in drawing records the visual sparks of Ionesco’s “collision.”