LEARNING TO SEE ANEW: PRIORITIES IN DRAWING AND EDUCATION
A panel discussion held at the Art Students League of New York on Friday, February 13, 2015, featuring presenters Jeffrey Carr, Brian Curtis, Peter Kaniaris, Samuel Messer (respondent), John Rise, Flash Rosenberg and Peter Trippi.
INTRODUCTORY COMMENTS
James Lancel McElhinney, moderator
Art education is in the midst of a sea change. The BFA MFA culture in which many of us were trained will not be sustainable forever, aggravated in part by diminishing opportunities for K12 students to receive any kind of visual training at school.
Many colleges are universities are stepping away from studio education, which one might argue is not a bad thing given their performance record. Meanwhile flagship institutions like Yale School of Art, founded in 1869 and first led by John Ferguson Weir, whose brother Julian taught here at the League, or the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts continue to represent the highest standards of studio learning in accredited institutions of higher learning. Both institutions are represented today on this panel. Public universities that evolved from Land Grant college offered drawing at first as an industrial skill, but also to quote Horace Mann, as a “moral force”, necessary to the formation of a well-educated citizenry. Drawing and penmanship have been discarded by many schools in favor of keyboarding, a decision made by people who never enjoyed the benefits of Mann’s vision of universal education, and thus know not what they do. In 1834 Rembrandt Peale published Graphics, a manual of drawing and penmanship. In the introduction he observed that writing is drawing letters, while drawing is writing forms. On the title page of John Gadsby Chapman’s 1847 American Drawing Book is the exhortation that “anyone that can learn to write can learn to draw”. Massachusetts has vowed to maintain penmanship in its primary curricula, but many other states are doing away with it altogether. When Sony Imageworks announced at a SIGGRAF conference in Boston that it had secretly run a life drawing academy, followed by similar confessions by Pixar, Disney and other animation houses, many colleges and universities had to backpedal out of digital-privileging dismissals of traditional foundations subjects and resuscitate their drawing programs. The development of the Wacom tablet, iPad and Bluetooth stylus and new drawing software has created a tense parity between digital and analog drawing media. Many studio artists have yet to grasp the implications. Both offer different advantages, giving us more tools with which to draw. The later Bernie Chaet used to proclaim with emphasis, that drawing is not a technique! Nothing can be learned about Shakespeare by studying goose quills, or Hemingway by examining typewriters. Drawing is a language.
The question is how to teach it. Pre-college education requires everyone to study language and math, including people with no plans to become writers or physicists. Yet drawing is withheld to all but those who declare artistic ambitions. Everything in the man-made world and the built environment begins with a drawing. Thus with no understanding of drawing, how can one understand design, or how it shapes the world in which we live?
Today the Art Students league of New York is privileged to present a distinguished panel of speakers who will identify new priorities in drawing and education. We may not settle the matter today, but we may be able to set things in motion, in more useful directions.