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Fall Quarter Essay — August 2008 The Spirit of Outreach: Connecting The Drawing Studio with the world as-it-is by Andrew Rush   ©2008 “Outreach, n: 1. the provision of information or services to groups in society who might otherwise be neglected; vt 2. to exceed or go beyond a limit."

 

Now that The Drawing Studio is settling into our handsome new downtown home, one would think we might finally be ready to sit back and let the world come to our door. Yet there we go again, as you will notice in this fall newsletter, adding several new locations to our ‘satellite’ program in order to make our core drawing courses more accessible to people who live in the perimeter of Tucson, Green Valley, Patagonia and Oracle. (Spread the word, by the way.) The truth is, the spirit of outreach has always been central to our mission, by extending our invitation to people of any age or profession to learn the skills of visual observation through the practices of drawing. At TDS, outreach is not a nice gesture, it is our stated mission-in-action. Seen another way, what our new home provides to this commitment is a solid physical base from which we can more confidently extend ourselves out into our community. Our Outreach Art Tutorials for Seniors (OATS) is now offered in a dozen locations. Added to our year-long youth intensives we have also offer an after-school arts project with the Continental School District in Green Valley, Arizona (entering its second year), and are initiating a school-year partnership with three local schools involving gallery and studio experiences. However, there is another face of ‘outreach’ that is more subtle. It came to me unexpectedly this spring when several of my long-standing students began to press me with a question.  Basically they said, “OK, now we have a working experience of the drawing languages, and we are enthusiastic about continuing.  But what we need to know is, what’s next?” Of course, the obvious answer to a “what’s next” question is the same that one would give to any new enthusiast after learning any new language, which is to go to the next level, by pushing on beyond mere competence toward higher competence that allows one’s personal eloquence to emerge. For this purpose (and despite our name), The Drawing Studio offers a wide array of excellent studio art-making courses that lead to mastery. But I could sense my students had a hidden question wrapped inside “what’s next?” –more like, “How do I take this awakening visual ability out into the real world?” Or “How do I integrate my art into my regular life of family, job and other interests?” Or even “How do I find a way to use my art language to make a difference in the world—maybe not as a full time professional artist—but still in a way that really matters?” So I ruminated upon my own personal experience more carefully. I floundered through some large generalizations that seem mostly stupid, but finally found a better question: “What do I actually do?” That is, how do I myself specifically stretch, expand and connect my art self to the larger world? As I listed a number of areas I could explore, there was one practice that just sat there in plain sight, waiting for me to notice: namely, my lifelong and encyclopedic record of my visual conversation with the world; namely, my sketchbooks. For fifty years I have developed the habit of carrying one or more sketchbooks with me wherever I go.  Into these sketchbooks I regularly: 1) enter drawings of the world before me often using various media; 2) explore ideas, designs, color notations of real or imaginary projects; 3) collect and paste in images of more than passing interest to me; 4) jot down notes; 5) glue or tape in drawings from envelopes, napkins, doodles or other playful moments, etc. Over time, these sketchbooks gather, collect, and mirror an overview of my visual relationship with the world. Often I see connections myself for the first time, because as I draw to learn more about what I see, my sketchbooks also allow my thoughts, feelings and experiments to show up spontaneously, without editing or suppression. Looking back over time, I note that my sketchbooks have become the source material for most of the projects that have inspired my life work as an artist. So from that insight and thanks to my students once again, this summer I have been working with twenty TDS ‘drawers’ in a course we invented in the road as it were, called The Sketchbook Seminar. We are meeting only once a month and by e-mail. My assignments explore simple issues such as how and what to enter into one’s sketchbook, or the more complex strategies for developing new habits needed to take this mini- studio (sketchbook and tools) into the very crevices of one’s own life and on a regular basis.* I know of course that there are lots of good art schools out there, where with time and diligence a person can learn the traditional formulas of art-making—and our programs at TDS include passing along these skills. Yet what distinguishes our core mission at The Drawing Studio is to open up the conversation about the languages of vision to everyone, which means literally reaching out, inventing ways to extend the opportunity to people beyond the art-school model to learn to 'see’—not as a specialist profession, but as a practice and a wider conversation that belongs to all of us, at any age or walk of life. So what’s next? I am promising my twenty sketchbook seminarians that, if they keep their sketchbooks alive for at least five years, what will emerge will be twenty astonishing points-of-view about life, each challenging our own small bubble of reality about the world, each unique as art and breath-taking as expression, each an inspiration to look again. Because the life under our nose still has surprises. © 2008 Andrew Rush  * This newsletter includes selections of sketchbook pages from the seminar group in process at this writing.