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Fall Quarter Essay — August 2005

The Tyranny of Yesterday's Seeing

If there is a shared art educational philosophy at The Drawing Studio, it is the distinction between art-knowledge as 'understanding' (sometimes called art appreciation) and art- knowledge as the biological memory that is acquired through studio practice. The study of drawing and design (the Italian word 'disegno' means both, by the way) is of the second variety, art-knowledge through practice.

The practice of drawing has little to do with talent. In fact I have noticed that in my drawing courses, the person who may appear as 'talented' to others often has the hardest time with my assignments. Because talent may only be the ability to make a drawing that looks like what other people expect to see. I call this 'the tyranny of yesterday's seeing'.

For example, we all know people who believe that how they 'see' the world is how it really is. Such people often unknowingly project their views upon others in a rigid and righteous way. Most times, such a disjunction is merely trivial, like an old girlfriend's dismissal of my musical tastes as trash (well, in fairness she said 'uninformed'). But sometimes a blind righteousness can inflict real long-term damage, as the recent terrorist events of our time attest.

To set out to learn the language of markmaking begins a very personal journey that soon reveals the limitations of one's own seeing. To learn to draw is to regularly examine one's most inner assumptions about what one is actually observing-a process that can be both unsettling and exciting at the same time.

At The Drawing Studio the place we start is to learn the skills, tools, and the conventions of the grammar of drawing as it is practiced in our culture. Underneath, however, is the most important skill of all, which is learning how to pay attention. As we practice, we begin to discover that 'seeing' has both inner and outer components that cut deeply into the way and pace with which we live our lives. This process includes overcoming our barriers to sustaining the quiet attitude of 'presence' that allows us to connect and to look freshly at our subject.

A week ago I was visiting the exhibition of paintings by Henri Matisse at the Metropolitan Museum in New York, standing in a gallery full of his drawings of models dressed in a variety of carefully observed Slavic peasant blouses (Fig. 1,2). On an end wall of the room was also a large painting entitled The Dream (Fig. 3), a study of a favorite model in a peasant blouse like those in the drawings. The wall text noted that the painting took forty sittings, and that Matisse, as he often did, had started with a very naturalistic rendition. Then, over those many sittings, he kept reducing the visual information into ever simpler units of shape and color.

Figure 1

Figure 2

Figure 3

I thought to myself that Matisse was no more exempt from the tyranny of yesterday's seeing than you or I. Rather he was a practiced master of questioning what he was observing, asking himself as he worked, "what is the essence of what I see?". Then, going ever deeper, he eliminates whatever seems unnecessary, refining his vision again and again, until all that remains is a kind of 'elixir' of the spirit of his subject. The Dream by Henri Matisse is the result of this patient process. It is record of a new 'seeing' , a mastepiece of a distilled visual intelligence that continues to inspire our own practice of observing, decades later. It is called a work of art.

©2005 Andrew Rush. May not be copied or reproduced in any form without permission