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Fall Quarter Essay — August 2004

Why The Drawing Studio?
by Andrew Rush   ©2004

Recently, a new visitor to The Drawing Studio said to me, "I notice you offer a whole range of studio courses in addition to your drawing classes. Why do you call yourselves 'The Drawing Studio,' a name that doesn't reveal the quality and depth of your curriculum, which includes painting, printmaking or sculpture?

In thinking about this question over the summer, I have come to hold it as an invitation to all of us at TDS to review our growth and the relevance of our mission, twelve years after our founding. In that spirit, I am using this essay as a response in two parts: first, by exploring what we at The Drawing Studio mean by drawing; and second, by sharing what I believe is a "sea-change" producing a broad new interest in the visual arts and what this means to our mission.

Part I: At TDS the study of drawing is a complex adventure into the language of seeing. It begins by demonstrating that how we "see" is largely a cultural interpretation rooted in belief and in habit. From that premise we proceed to show, via the practice of drawing, how the ability to observe is a skill which both grounds us and opens up our vision in ways we did not realize was possible. We come to understand that drawing is a physical activity, which begins with a formal 'noticing' process (looking at something 'over there'). The eye then informs the mind/brain, which responds via the nervous system with a physical movement that marks a surface, usually with a tool held by the hand.

Thus to learn to draw requires a complex set of skills involving eye, mind and body. With guided practice, these skills become an integrated activity that improves with continual practice, especially when joined to an adventurous spirit of inquiry. The tracery that results, called 'the drawing', is not so much a picture as it is a record of a process in which, paradoxically, the act of taking one's attention off oneself and placing it onto a subject 'outside' oneself reveals the inner life of the observer.

Actually, I much prefer the Italian word for drawing: disegno. While disegno also refers to the object we call 'a drawing', its deeper Latin-based meaning refers to the whole domain that today we might call 'visual thinking'-- the study of how we communicate by learning the skills that allow us to orchestrate the elements of space and surface, color and light, shape and proportion, volume, form and texture.

Thus the study of drawing (in the sense of disegno) is not about making a commodity for sale or approval-that is, the study of drawing is not about making drawings. The drawing curriculum at TDS is about giving people of all walks of life the skills of observation, along with the tools that permit a serious visual conversation with others. Our name, The Drawing Studio, was chosen to reflect our commitment to this core of art that the Italians historically call disegno.

Part II: The question of visual literacy, the sea-change of our time.
In 1992 when we started TDS with a couple of drawing classes, my original idea was to restore the almost lost art of drawing-from-observation to the central place that it had once occupied in art studies-a place it somehow lost in the post-modern period of art education. In our beginning years, most of our students were active as artists at some level or beginners who were exploring the idea of some kind of art career.

However, as we began to outgrow our space and add new classes and teachers, I began to grasp that something beyond an interest in art-as-career was driving the growth of interest in our courses. While crediting our splendid teachers, I also began to notice that our students were now coming from a wide cross section of the community, with active and satisfying careers in many fields other than art, and showing no signs of making any serious change of profession.

What these students share is a growing intuition that the studio arts, especially the core practices of working from observation, are as relevant to their life today as learning to read and write was after the invention of the printing press. The skills we now call visual literacy are opening new continents of knowledge that have both practical and spiritual implications, which I think we have barely grasped, much less know how to represent to others.

In other essays I have often (may I say even tiresomely) referred to what I have come to call the 'sea-change' of our time, the worldwide revolution of multi-media communications that is fast replacing many of the traditional ideas of literacy with new visual languages and their new tools of access. I sometimes think of our students at TDS as the 'lead-scouts' in this sea-change. They are learning, as Rudolf Arnheim pointed out 50 years ago, that the path into this new continent of perceptual (spatial) thinking begins in the art studio-not as information, but as practice. Suddenly the esoteric mysteries of the art studio, considered for centuries as 'secret knowledge' of a few gifted 'artists', are about to be dragged kicking and screaming onto the center stage of life.

Even we at TDS, a young artist enterprise free of some of the difficult and myopic burdens of older art institutions, are just barely embarked upon this new learning curve. But we are responding: we are opening a wider variety of studio courses; we are restructuring our drawing curriculum to be more accessible and flexible in response to peoples' busy schedules; we are diversifying our scheduling so there are activities, small and large, starting each month; we are growing an intensive art program, The Art of Summer, for younger artists; this fall, we will launch an outreach tutorial initiative to take teachers into senior communities that cannot easily come to us.

We are certainly aware that we are outgrowing our first mission, we are close to outgrowing our available space, and we may be outgrowing our name.

But it's going to take an inspiration of the first magnitude to convince me that our name, The Drawing Studio, does not still reflect the soul of what we are here to contribute. But then, as my associates remind me, anything is possible. Stay tuned.

©2004 Andrew Rush. May not be copied or reproduced in any form without permission